Title: The Spanish Marriage (1933)
Author: Helen Simpson
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The Spanish Marriage

by

Helen Simpson

First published 1933

[The INDEX has not been included in this ebook.]

FOREWORD

This book pretends to be a narrative only, and not a work of reference.
Those who like to go direct to the authorities will find a list of these in
another place. The headings to the chapters are taken from the Colloquies of
Erasmus.

I have thought it as well when quoting from documents to simplify the old
capricious spelling, which has its charms, but arrests the unaccustomed eye,
and will not let the sense flow freely; 'qweyn,' for example, is not readily to
be identified with our 'coin.'

I am happy to pay tribute here to the knowledge and discrimination of Miss
Scott-Rogers, who found all my illustrations for me.

ILLUSTRATIONS1. QUEEN MARY
(From the portrait by Sir Antonio Moro in the Prado Museum, Madrid)
2. CHARLES V AS A BOY
(From the portrait by an unknown artist of the Flemish School in the
National Gallery of Scotland)
3. TREATY BETWEEN FRANCIS I AND CARDINAL WOLSEY FOR AN ALLIANCE DEPENDING
ON A MARRIAGE BETWEEN HENRY, DUKE OF ORLEANS AND PRINCESS MARY
4. KATHERINE OF ARAGON
(From the portrait by an unknown artist in the National Portrait Gallery)
5. THE PALACE OF GREENWICH FROM THE OBSERVATORY HILL
(From a contemporary drawing by A. van den Wyngaerde in the Bodleian
Library)
6. QUEEN ELIZABETH AS PRINCESS
(From the portrait by an unknown artist of the school of Holbein, in the
Royal Collection at Windsor. Reproduced by gracious permission of His
Majesty the King)
7. THE TOWER OF LONDON
(From a contemporary drawing by A. van den Wyngaerde in the Bodleian
Library)
8. WESTMINSTER
(From a contemporary drawing by A. van den Wyngaerde in the Bodleian
Library)
9. PHILIP II OF SPAIN
(From the portrait attributed to Sofonisba Angiusciola, in the National
Portrait Gallery)
10. LADY JANE GREY
(From the portrait by an unknown artist in the National Portrait Gallery)
11. SIR THOMAS WYAT
(From a contemporary portrait of the school of Holbein)
12. LONDON BRIDGE
(From a contemporary drawing by A. van den Wyngaerde in the Bodleian
Library)
13. THE QUEEN'S INSTRUCTIONS TO THE LORD PRIVY SEAL TO RECEIVE KING
PHILIP AT SOUTHAMPTON
14. REVERSE OF MEDAL COMMEMORATING SPANISH MARRIAGE
14a. OBVERSE OF MEDAL COMMEMORATING SPANISH MARRIAGE
15. PASSPORT FOR RICHARD SHELLEY, ESQUIRE, selected to announce to the
King of Portugal and the Princess of Portugal, Regent in Spain, the
Queen's happy delivery of a prince. Signed Philippus and Marye
the Quene. (Queen Mary, when under the delusion that she was
pregnant, caused such letters to be addressed to several foreign princes,
announcing her confinement, and with the approval of her husband,
selected the messengers who were to convey them)
(Public Record Office)

INTRODUCTORY

England in the early years of Henry VIII may be seen as a newly risen power,
with continental commitments; a rich country, thanks to the economies of the
King's father, and for this reason sought as an ally by the more considerable
States. Her traditional friendships were with Spain and Portugal, her enmities
with Scotland and France; of these latter, Scotland, crushed by the victory of
Flodden in 1513, gave little trouble during Henry's reign.

The Empire was a sprawling net of territories that included Spain, the
Netherlands, Burgundy, Sicily, and Naples, with a host of small principalities,
electorates, and bishoprics in Central Europe, now drawing together against the
advancing menace of the Turk. These territories encircled France, and
perpetually threatened, according to the temper of their masters, that compact
kingdom. In 1521, Charles, grandson of Ferdinand of Aragon, was elected to the
imperial throne, and thereby found himself heir to an alliance with England,
together with a considerable debt; Henry VIII had lent money to his wife's
relatives for wars in Barbary and for the quieting of the Low Countries.
Charles was prepared to accept and further this alliance, without any wish to
add to his responsibilities by conquest, and to pay the debt by any means which
did not involve the passing of money. The New World had not yet begun to yield
its treasures. The Emperor, for all his power, was poor.

France was ruled by a young man of great personal courage but indifferent
judgment, Francis I. He succeeded Louis XII, who had no children by his
marriage with Mary, a sister of Henry VIII. This marriage left no trace in
French history, and English history is concerned with it only because Louis'
death left his widow free to marry the Duke of Suffolk; from her Jane Grey's
claim to the English Crown derived. Francis, quarrelsome, still had the wit to
perceive that no country could deal successfully with enemies attacking from
all sides; and when Burgundy, Spain, Navarre and the Netherlands came together
under Charles, he attempted to shield himself against invasion from the west by
friendship with England. This plan wrecked itself on the personality of Henry,
jealous of the French King's success in war--he had won Milan and Genoa at the
age of twenty--and inclined by tradition and family ties to side with the
Empire.

The Pope from 1513 to 1521 was Leo X, a Medici, whose predecessors in
Florence France had, not long before, dispossessed. As a temporal sovereign he
was England's ally, and when his spiritual authority began to be disputed he
found English theology at his service. Luther's theses on Predestination and
the Sacraments were combated, the first by Erasmus, the second by Henry, who
gained thereby the title of Defender of the Faith which has remained with the
English Crown. Germany took the disease of heresy first and badly; ten years of
it threatened to split the Empire. Persecutions had not been unknown hitherto
in Europe, but as printing and translation spread knowledge of the Bible, they
multiplied. The Reformation was a political force from its inception.

At the time Mary, Princess of England, was born her father was twenty-five,
Francis three years younger, and Charles a boy of sixteen, not yet Emperor. The
two former were near in temperament as in years, warlike, absolute, and
jealous. Charles physically was no match for either; he was poor, prudent, and
peaceful to hold his own, though he had a heavy hand with rebellion. The
approaches and withdrawals of these three men, with the spiritual war in which
according to temperament they took sides, made twenty years of the history of
Europe.

I

PAMPHILUS. The maid, as I said, came of very honest parents, had a
good fortune, was very handsome; in a word, was a match for a
prince.

By the time she was ten years old Henry VIII's elder daughter had been three
times betrothed. At the age of two she stood in a great room at Greenwich
Palace with her mother's hands on her shoulders, her father and her aunt, the
Queen of France, beside her; and heard, without heeding greatly, an oration
from the Bishop of London praising and recommending the holy estate of
matrimony. At the end of this--it was a speech of some length--the Venetian
ambassador says that the Princess Mary was taken up in arms; her parents and
the French ambassadors were asked if they consented on behalf of the
contracting parties to a betrothal between the Dauphin of France and the King
of England's daughter. Cardinal Wolsey presented a ring; the Lord Admiral put
it on her finger, a gold band with a great diamond in it. There was a blessing;
a further exordium, this time from the Cardinal; and the proceedings ended with
High Mass, which if it were sung with full ceremony, as the Venetian declares
that it was, must have taken at least an hour and a half longer. The choir was
dressed in cloth of gold, and the display altogether was of a magnificence that
astounded even the rich Republic's man.

Promises were lavish, too. The contract which was drawn up some ten days
later provided for a dowry with Mary of a hundred thousand marks on the day
that she should marry the Dauphin, at this time only a few months old. And
there was what Portia calls 'old swearing,' to the effect that Henry regarded
this vow as binding; if he failed to fulfil his part of the contract, he
consented that his kingdom should be bound by interdict; the King of France,
more discreetly, promised only to match the hundred thousand marks with 'as
large a dowry as any Queen of France had ever had,' under similar pain if he
broke his oath.

So much for the first betrothal, and the first contract with France. It was
signed in October 1518; the terms were read out at Mass by a priest from the
altar. A year later, the whole aspect had changed. The Dauphin was, in 1518,
one of the best partis in Europe, but by 1520 there was a better,
Charles, Katherine's nephew, King of Spain, now elected Emperor. Francis too
had been a candidate for the imperial Crown, and a good deal of money had been
spent in convincing the German electors that it would be for their good to have
as ruler a prince whose character is given by the Venetian ambassador as
follows:

'His looks are most royal; his mind and body robust. He is a great eater, a
good drinker, and a better sleeper than either. He is all for enjoyment, his
dress always very fine, rich in stones and pearls, to say nothing of broidery.
As for the things of the mind and spirit, these are not so much to his
taste.'

The German electors very prudently took money from both sides; and having by
these means disposed of any charge of partiality that might lie against them,
declared for Charles, whereby he became absolute lord of a third part of Europe
at twenty years of age.

He had almost split Spain in two in the attempt to push his claim. He was a
Fleming, brought up in the Low Countries, who spoke Spanish badly, and knew
nothing at all of the prides and jealousies to which he was heir. He needed
money, and summoned the Cortes, as was constitutional, to get it; but he
regarded his own convenience by appointing as the place of meeting Galicia,
whence, the money secured, he could depart at once by sea. Galicia was an
inaccessible rustic province, offensive to Castilians. There was rebellion in
Valladolid; Madrid, Toledo, Cordoba protested. Charles yielded so far as to
change the place of convocation to Coruña, and got his subsidies on May
19th, 1520; next day he set sail, leaving Spain in a turmoil, and his Flemish
chancellor to deal with it, which he did by fines so heavy that for some time
afterwards a Castilian would take off his hat at sight of a piece of gold.

It was evident that the rejected candidate--'We both court the same
mistress,' was Francis' phrase, 'and each should urge his suit with all the
address of which he is master'--would not long leave his successful rival in
peace. The old military arguments presented themselves with their usual
impressiveness; as that when an attack is certain it is good tactics to
forestall it; that a man who has much will certainly want more; and that
passivity under insult is dishonouring to a king and the nation he rules.
Francis, besides, had something of a taste for war, and had been brilliantly
successful at Marignano, when he beat Sforza and won Milan for France. His
challenge was not so rash as it sounded. Charles was nominally lord of Austria,
Spain, the Low Countries, the Sicilics, and the Americas, with all the wealth
at his back that such lordship implied. But Francis had Switzerland to draw on
for troops, a privilege for which he had paid 700,000 crowns annually, awaiting
just such a moment as this. Charles' possessions were scattered and
troublesome; France was compact and loyal: 'the French,' said Carvalli, 'seem
to have abandoned their wills wholly to the King.' But he needed a free hand,
or rather the certainty that England would not pounce when his back was turned.
There had been uncomfortable rumours; a contract of marriage, relationship
in petto, was not much to set against the Emperor's blood tie with the
English throne. Urgent letters of regard and esteem suggested the immediate
marriage of the two babies, and appointed a place where the two Kings might
confer in amity on French soil.

Charles' ministers too held conclaves, not liking the alliance, but could
find no way to prevent it except by marrying off their own master. True,
Charles was betrothed to the Princess Charlotte of France, aged three, and the
King of Portugal had a grown daughter for disposal with 80,000 crowns who
seemed very willing to have him. But there was not much money with the Princess
Charlotte, and as for Portugal, it was a quarter from which at the moment no
danger threatened. The statesmen, with their quaint belief, surviving betrayals
untold, that family ties protect a country in war, waved away these various
contracts, and combined the available pieces to make another pattern; England
and the Empire against France.

For England, Spain was not yet the enemy. It was a country, to English
minds, too far away to be dangerous, even with the Low Countries tacked on to
it by the accident of a crown. France, on the other hand, was resented as an
upstart; Paris had had an English governor only a century before. The English
view was that Frenchmen were rebels, insufficiently persuaded of the benefits
that flowed inevitably from English rule, and that their King, instead of
treating on something more than equal terms with a Tudor, ought to be cap in
hand to him. In England too, therefore, there were conclaves, and plans
centring upon the figure of the small yellow-haired Princess, 'right merry,
daily exercising herself in virtuous pastimes and occupations,' and still the
Dauphin's bride, wearing his ring.

The Venetian ambassador, Giustiniani, met Mary one day being carried in her
nurse's arms, her father walking by her. He knelt, then reached up to kiss her
hand. 'By Almighty God, my lord,' said Henry, in the colloquial Latin which was
his usual speech with foreigners, 'there's never a tear from this girl of
mine.' 'Her destiny does not move her to tears,' the Venetian answered, 'how
should it, since she is to be Queen of France?'

Thus there was no outward admitting of the fact that the whole European case
was altered. Spies presented their reports, letters went to and fro carrying
rumours; when these became too detailed and convincing Henry sent civil
disclaimers to Francis, protesting that their bargain still held; to which
Francis responded, saying that for his own part he would rather have the
Princess Mary for his son, 'though the King's grace had ten children, than the
King of Portingale's daughter, with all the spices her father hath.'

At this time there was hardly a princess in Europe of whatever age with any
dowry that was not provisionally betrothed in this manner. Some were puppets
and remained so. Some that were older knew their own minds, and made
negotiation difficult by a frank statement of their intentions. The Portuguese
Princess Isabella, for example, Isabella the small and fair, so short lived and
dearly loved, was determined to be Empress. She took for her motto Aut
Caesar, aut nihil, and announced it to Europe, while her father increased
his offer to a million crowns in gold. This was tempting, and Charles
hesitated, necessary though it was for him to break the Francis-Henry alliance.
Marriage alone would settle matters with Henry, from whom already he had
borrowed 30,000 crowns, a fact which Wolsey, when the dealing between them came
down to figures, did not allow him to forget. Charles, bargaining, asked a
million crowns with the English princess. Wolsey coolly offered 80,000, from
which the original debt was to be deducted. Charles, a good deal taken aback at
this view of his value through English eyes, played for time, while Francis,
not merely suspicious, but perfectly well aware of all that was going on and
determined to put a stop to it, pressed for a ratification of the marriage
treaty with his son. A date was fixed, reluctantly, by the English plotters;
the end of the month of May was appointed, and orders went out to all the
tailors, armourers, and upholsterers of two countries.

It was too much for Charles' resolution. Five days before the meeting at the
Field of the Cloth of Gold he appeared in England; 'specially to see the Queen
of England, his aunt,' says Hall's Chronicle, 'was the intent of the Emperor.'
He went no further than Canterbury, where Henry met him, and Wolsey, at whose
invitation he was in England. 'Come, and you shall be welcome; ask, and you
shall have; speak openly and freely, and we shall say Amen to whatever you
say.' The people were pleased with the simplicity of the Emperor, his foreign
manner and meekness.' What passed at the interview nobody at this present date
knows.

Mary did not go with her parents to France, but stayed quietly with her
governess, Lady Bryan, at Richmond, where some French gentlemen came to see her
and compliment her from the Dauphin. The council wrote to Henry, busy with
festivities but not to the neglect of all domesticity, that the Princess
'welcomed the French gentlemen with most goodly countenance, proper
communication, and pleasant pastime in playing on the virginals; and they
greatly marvelled and rejoiced at the same, her young and tender age
considered.' She was only four, very small, a pretty child, 'who promises,' the
Spaniard de Sabinas wrote, 'to be a handsome lady.'

The French gentlemen thus solemnly commending the two infants to each other
were made very welcome. Their entertainment cost thirty-five shillings and
threepence, and consisted of cherries, old apples (this was in June), wafers
and strawberries, with four gallons of hippocras. They, or similar French
gentlemen, were continually during this year keeping an eye on the Princess,
while equivalent English gentlemen crossed the Channel to condole with the
little Dauphin on an accident, or to take him precious stones and toys. The
outward show of friendship and alliance was never allowed to lapse.

The Emperor was making up his mind. His dash to England in June had been an
unusually impulsive action, and the probability is that he had at that time
committed himself. Certainly about the middle of next year a commission was
appointed to consider all arrangements for his marriage with Mary, which
included, since he and she were first cousins, a dispensation to be procured
from the Pope. The commission took no great time over their business. The Pope
was complaisant, the money was ready; in addition to the marriage matter, and
in the same treaty, Henry and Charles bound themselves to attack Francis by a
certain date, he being meanwhile a prospective father-in-law of the one and
standing in the same relation to the other's daughter. Two years after his
first visit Charles landed at Dover.

There was no doubt about his popularity with the English. They had some
notion of him as the King of the world, and his choice of an English princess
for consort confirmed them in their new and excellent national conceit of
themselves. There was enthusiasm which may be compared, not happily, with the
kind of welcome his son found in 1554, when 'demonstrations of joy were obliged
upon the people,' says the French ambassador, 'on pain of death'; and Philip's
envoy, Count Egmont, was brought down Cheapside, 'where the people nothing
rejoicing held down their heads sorrowfully.' All the way from Dover to
Greenwich Charles was applauded, and when at last he arrived at the gates of
the palace the Queen herself stood there, holding her daughter's hand, to
welcome him. He asked her blessing on his knees, which must have made the
watching crowds proud of their King's wife, and 'had great joy to see his young
cousin german the Lady Mary.'

There were the inevitable festivities in London, followed by a removal to
Windsor to consider more soberly the treaty of marriage, in which certain
clauses appear to cancel each other out. One provided that the existing
differences between the Emperor and the King of France should be settled as
soon as might be; another, for the invasion of France by a joint expedition to
recover English ground there lost; those cities quite honestly and legally
purchased by Francis in the year 1516 with money won in the Italian campaign.
Another clause insisted that the Princess at twelve years old should be sent to
Spain to finish her education there.

This treaty, though officially no word was breathed of its existence, was no
secret so far as Francis was concerned. He was aware of it; he was alarmed by
it. He was spoiling to attack the Emperor over the border in the vulnerable Low
Countries, but held back for fear lest Henry should strike, very well aware how
the loss of those once English towns Tournai, St. Amand, Mortagne--rankled in
English memories. He perceived that it was not the moment for any kind of
action. He held his hand and his tongue, and let time, and the Emperor's
difficulties, unravel the tangle for him.

It seems fairly evident that Henry, though he coveted this splendid marriage
for his daughter, had no real hope of it. While the treaty still held, and
Charles wrote from Spain of 'my beloved bride, future imperatrix, the
Princess,' a rumour was favoured among the ambassadors that some intrigue was
going on with the King of Scots, who was to have a pension and a claim upon the
English Crown if he would marry Mary. But while the chance of the more
brilliant match still held, Henry was neglecting no means to bring it about.
Ambassadors extraordinary went to Spain, one of them that same Bishop of
London, Tunstall, who had so exhorted the Princess and her parents concerning
the sanctity of marriage contracts years ago when she was pledged to the
Dauphin. And Mary herself, now nine years old, sent Charles a message with a
gift, an emerald, by which the symbolists of the period represented chastity;
traditionally, such stones burst asunder in the presence of illicit love.

'Her Grace hath devised this token, for a better knowledge to be had, when
God shall send them grace to be together, whether his majesty do keep himself
as continent and chaste as with God's grace she will, whereby ye may say, his
majesty may see that her assured love towards the same hath already such
operation in her, that it is also confirmed by jealousy, being one of the
greatest signs and tokens of hearty love and cordial affection.'

Jealousy, of a man she had seen only for a day or two three years before, is
a preposterous word in the mouth of this child. Her mother dictated the letter,
perhaps; quite certainly her mother was for ever talking to her daughter of
Spain. Katherine had never forgotten her country. Gentlemen who wished to
please her spoke to her in Spanish, the arms of Spain were embroidered with
those of England on her cloth of estate, and she kept her pride as Ferdinand
and Isabella's daughter. It must have seemed to her the fate of all others to
be prayed for, that her child should sit on the throne her own mother had made
glorious. She must have prayed for her nephew's victory in the war which was
declared as a result of the provisions of the Treaty of Windsor becoming known.
Such petitions are dangerous; they may be granted. Francis lost at Pavia; he
went to Madrid a prisoner, stripped of power, and the one reason for the
Emperor's condescension to a princess none too well portioned ceased to
exist.

With Francis out of the way, Henry became unimportant, and the Emperor set
about getting out of his bargain. He was peremptory. Mary was to be sent to
Spain at once. Her dowry was to be increased to 400,000 ducats, with a further
200,000 crowns towards the expense of the war with France, in which he had
engaged on Henry's behalf. As to the 30,000 already owing, nothing was said
about that. Wolsey was firm. The Princess would only be exchanged for a hostage
of equal rank; she was too young and too precious to be taken otherwise out of
the kingdom. The ambassadors bowed, and after saluting the King and Queen, made
a brief address in Latin to the Princess, who replied with fluency in the same
tongue. But they too, in spite of politeness, were firm. They were instructed
to take possession of the Princess and the money at once, or else the King must
release the Emperor from his promise. Henry gave an angry answer, refused to
consider an increase of dowry; as for the Spanish upbringing, if the Emperor
'should seek a mistress for her, to frame her after the manner of Spain, and of
whom she might take example of virtue, he should not find in all Christendom a
more meet than she now hath, that is the Queen's grace, her mother, who is
comen of the house of Spain, and who for the affection she beareth the Emperor
will nourish and bring her up as may be hereafter to his most
contentation.'

Charles protested. It was time he should marry; his subjects expected it,
and favoured the Portuguese princess, not only for her dowry, but because she
was more of an age to have children; Isabella was at this time twenty-three
years old. Henry, seeing his mind made up, was unwilling to quarrel. He agreed
to call the bargain off; on condition that Charles should make peace with
France and pay his debts to England. The Emperor agreed, and in a few days his
marriage contract with Isabella was signed. As for the 30,000 crowns, they were
conveniently forgotten; certainly they never returned to the English treasury,
though perhaps Wolsey's pockets knew something of their whereabouts. The
Emperor at his second visit had increased the Cardinal's pension--already, from
this source, 3000--to something more like 7000 crowns a year.

Mary Tudor, at this breakdown of both her marriage chances, was nine years
old. It was not to be supposed that her discreet governess, her silent mother,
did not now and then tell her stories of what her life as Empress would be. She
had seen Charles; the little Dauphin, never, though they had exchanged toys.
The normal small girl falls in love very easily, wreathing her imagination
round such objects as chance may present. A young man of twenty, with a great
name, ruler of half a dozen sounding countries; a simple and dignified young
man, who went on his knee for her mother's blessing; such a husband, together
with the thought of seeing Spain, must have made a curious and attractive
picture in her mind, of orange trees, and deep rivers, with herself sitting on
a throne surrounded by gentlemen wearing their hats. Mary was half a Spaniard,
and the country of a mother's exile takes on colours not altogether
earthly.

But she was now proclaimed Princess of Wales, heiress, that is, to the
Crown; and sent off to make the acquaintance of her principality 'accompanied
with an honourable, sad, discreet, and expert counsel.' With travelling, music,
and the practice of four languages it is not to be supposed that the child had
leisure or inclination to speculate on her destiny. It is notable, however,
that she became 'very perfect in Spanish.'

The political game, played then as always with small regard for the
decencies, took, in 1527, another turn. By this time, despite an ugly display
of double-dealing on both sides, Francis and Henry were friends again, and the
next move came from the King of France, once more suggesting marriage; not this
time on his son's behalf, but on his own. He was told that Mary, 'the pearl of
the world,' would be handed over as the price of alliance and in return for the
town of Boulogne. Alliances were cheap, they could be made and unmade with the
help of a scrap of paper and a seal; towns, once ceded, were not so easily
regained. The King hesitated, and his mother, Louise of Savoy, took it upon
herself to move the hard hearts of the English envoys. Her son, she said, had
for many years been eager to marry Princess Mary, both for her manifold virtues
and other gay qualities.' Francis at this time was thirty-three, had been
married and widowed twice, and had seven legitimate children.

Ambassadors after this drove like shuttles across and across the Channel,
with requests for pictures, civil letters, the pictures themselves, and the
usual reports of spies; most of which latter insisted that the King of England
had no intention of marrying his child to any foreigner; that the people would
not bear it; and that if he did there would be general war. The Princess Mary,
however, was put through her paces for the envoys as before, showing her
writing, her skill at music and Latin; which being satisfactory there was
another magnificent betrothal, with a sermon from yet another bishop, a
Frenchman this time, on the beauties and duties of matrimony; and afterwards
dancing in the Queen's apartment at Greenwich.

One of the French envoys, de Turenne, who danced with Mary, running an
expert eye over her frailness--she was a slender, shortish girl--gave his
master his opinion, that she would not be fit for marriage for another three
years. She looked, however, very well, particularly in the masque or play that
followed. The scene opened with the view of a cave, guarded by gentlemen of the
court in cloth of gold doublets and tall plumes, carrying torches. Eight girls
were grouped within the cave, their dress as splendid as that of the
torchbearers; cloth of gold, hair gathered in nets, with richly jewelled
garlands over velvet caps, and the sleeves of their surcoats so long that they
almost touched the ground. The Princess was distinguished by the astonishing
display of jewels that she wore; carrying, said the Venetian ambassador, all
the gems of the eighth sphere. The dancing noblemen were masked and wore black
velvet slippers, the King, having recently been hurt at tennis, being obliged
to ease his foot in this way. The Princess at last took off her cap, and over
her shoulders fell her hair, which was a silver colour, very thick and curly.
The festivities went on till morning. It was one of the most splendid days of
Mary's life.

Wolsey in person was the next to meet the French King, now alarmed by the
Emperor's success in Rome, and something more than anxious for an ally of good
standing. Wolsey wrote after his interview that Francis was in a good
disposition concerning the Princess, 'and I, being her godfather, loving her
entirely, next unto your Highness, and above all other creatures, assured him I
was desirous she should be bestowed upon his person, as in the best and most
worthy place in Christendom.' Back came the ambassadors from England, full of
praise of the Princess, urging their King to conclude matters, until he, well
aware of the value of the match, and doing his best to argue on equal terms
with the cleverest diplomat in Europe, lost his temper.

'I know well enough her education, form, fashion, beauty and virtue, and
what father and mother she comes of. It is expedient and necessary for me and
this Kingdom that I should marry her; and I assure you that for this reason I
have as great a mind to her as ever I had to any woman.' But Wolsey continued
to play for time; he had other matters in his head besides the marriage, a
divorce for his master among them. He wanted, too, to see just what would
happen to the couple of armies Francis had sent into Italy. Both were beaten,
and the terms on which the Emperor insisted in the ensuing treaty of peace left
no room for negotiations with England; left, in fact, nothing for Francis to do
but keep some of his old promises. He had made proposals to the Emperor's
sister, he was now to marry her. The Dauphin, still betrothed to Mary, was to
take a Portuguese princess instead, and leave Mary to the Duke of Orleans, his
brother. A contract was accordingly drawn up and signed by Francis in August
1527.

Mary's list of suitors was not yet complete; but there can have been very
few women, few princesses even, who have been in their time betrothed to a
father and two of his sons; or who, pledged to one man at the age of nine, come
to marry his son thirty years later. It is ironic to find Henry VIII on the
verge of his great quarrel, clamouring to all Christendom that it was not
lawful for a man to marry his brother's wife, here preparing for his daughter
the fate of her own mother, the rejected Queen; and to see how this very
quarrel brought the contract to nothing. The divorce transformed the Princess
of Wales to a bastard without any claim upon the throne of England, and so
annulled her value as a factor in bargains. This aspect of the matter claims
attention.

A citizen of London kept a careful list of the Lord Mayors of his period
with the chief doings during each year of their office. His records begin with
Sir William Remington, under whose name for sole entry stand the words:

'Then came my Lady Katherine, the King's daughter of Castille, in to
England.'

Sir John Shaw's mayoralty followed. Under this is the entry:

'Then was Prince Arthur, the son of K. H. the VIIth, married unto my lady
Katherine above said at Paul's, and against her coming into London was many
goodly pageants made in the City at All-Hallowtide when they were married.'

Next, under Sir Bartholomew Rede:

'Then died Prince Arthur above said.'

Five years pass, under which are noted the burning of London bridge, the
arrival of Duke Philip of Burgundy at Plymouth, driven out of his course by bad
weather, the blowing down, in this same storm, of the weathercock on Paul's;
then comes the entry:

'Then did the duke of York, which was brother unto Prince Arthur aforesaid,
marry with my lady Katherine, his brother's wife, and was crowned both King and
Queen on midsummer day Sunday next after following.'

There was no doubt in this citizen's mind that Katherine had been Arthur's
wife. She was loved, 'as though she had been of the blood royal of England,'
says one ambassador. But the King in putting her away, had law, though not
public opinion, on his side. Erasmus, his friend, wrote in perplexity:

'No mortal ever heard me speak against the divorce or for it. I should have
been mad to volunteer an opinion when learned doctors and prelates could not
agree. I love the King, who has always been good to me. I love the Queen too,
as all good men do, and the King, I think, still does. How could I thrust
myself unasked into a dispute so invidious?'

This represents, probably, the feeling of most Englishmen in the matter.
When the Queen had five still-born children in eight years there were many who
attributed this series of disasters to heavenly impatience with incest. It was
then, as it is now, a crime in civil law to marry a dead husband's brother. It
was then, as now it is not, a thing quite out of the contemplation of statesmen
that a woman should reign alone. Married, she would be ruled by her husband;
unmarried, she would be, as Elizabeth later became, a prey for all the princes
of Europe to come hawking at. Katherine could now have no son; a son was needed
to save the kingdom from civil war at Henry's death. His passion for another
woman was only a lesser aspect of the main question, and he had at first, as
Erasmus perceived, who knew them both, no unkindness for the Queen. It was
hinted that retreat to a nunnery by Katherine would meet the required
conditions; she was assured by Henry in person that he could not marry while
she lived. But Katherine was a daughter of Spain, a great princess on whose
bed-hangings the arms of Spain, with those of England, were embroidered. A bill
of dispensation had been granted by the Pope, and she demanded that the matter
should be referred to his successor. She had to he content with appearing
before his legate. When she had pleaded, and withdrawn, Henry spoke to the
court:

'She is, my lords, as true, as obedient, as conformable a wife as I could in
my phantasy wish or desire. A woman of most gentleness, most humility and
buxomness, and of all qualities pertaining to nobility.'

But she had, and could have, no son. The trial dragged on, with rulings,
overrulings, canvassing of foreign and English universities for opinions, a
memorial to the Pope. Katherine remained silent, except for a repeated refusal
to be tried in England. She was ordered to leave the court, to give up
communication with her daughter, and obeyed both sentences. Months passed. At
the New Year Katherine ventured to send her husband a gold cup; she was ordered
to write no more to the King's grace, and the cup was returned.

Six months before, though the business of the divorce was in full bustle,
Henry still treated Katherine as his queen; 'although,' an observer says, 'he
sore lamented his chance, and made no mirth as he was wont to do,' 'he dined
and resorted to the Queen as he was accustomed, and minished nothing her
estate, and much loved and cherished their daughter, the Lady Mary.'

Mary's marriage was very much a question of the moment, if only because Anne
Boleyn detested and was jealous of her. The contract with Orleans still held,
but now, with the divorce in debate, it was Francis who objected, being
uncertain of her status and afraid, as he said, lest the world should say he
had married his son to a bastard. At this other suitors, some of them
improbable, and who would not have pretended to a legitimate daughter and
heiress of England, timidly put in their claim: King John of Poland, the Duke
of Cleves, the paralysed Duke of Milan. With all these Henry dealt in his
bluffest manner. He might ill-treat Mary at home, but foreigners should respect
any daughter of his; who dared to call her illegitimate did so at the risk of
his head. There had been a rumour at the court of the Emperor, grown probably
out of Anne's known spite, that she was to be married off to some base-born
person. The King wrote in a fury to contradict it: 'we hear such natural and
entire affection to our daughter, as when we shall happen to bestow her, it
shall well appear that we have no less regard to our honour and the advancement
of our blood.' The aspirants retired.

Despite this natural and entire affection Mary's allowances and her
household were cut down, while Anne, at the top of her power, squandered
gloriously, and was unsatisfied. An attempt to browbeat Katherine out of her
own personal jewels brought a reproof from the King's granddaughter to the
tradesman's, though no less an envoy than the Duke of Norfolk was sent for the
ornaments, which Anne proposed to wear at a meeting with the French King at
Calais.

'The Queen answered, that she would not send jewels or aught else to the
King, who had long since forbidden such communication; it was, besides, against
her conscience to give her jewels to adorn a person, the scandal of
Christendom, and the King's disgrace.' However, since he commanded he should be
obeyed, in this as in all things.

Anne wore the stones, and made at the conference the sort of figure that
might have been expected. No royal lady was there. Francis was courteous, gave
her a trinket and approved her dancing, but did not treat her as a Queen. She
returned to England, angry, and more determined than ever to be done with her
ambiguous position.

She had not long to wait. Cranmer--with, it must be said, many opinions on
his side, though the Pope's against him--pronounced the necessary sentence of
divorce, and a time of terror began for Queen Katherine. Anne's boasts had set
the ugliest talk on people's tongues, which certainly the Emperor's ambassador
took seriously, reporting that she would do the Princess all the harm she
possibly could, 'which is the thing your aunt dreads most.' And he goes on to
say that his insistence must be forgiven: 'the great pity I have for the Queen
and the Princess oblige me to take this course. The King is by nature kindly
and inclined to generosity, but this Anne hath so perverted him, that he does
not seem the same man.'

For all that, Henry did maintain his daughter in something like appropriate
state even after his second marriage; made her an occasional present--ten
pounds to distribute in alms, ten pounds 'for her use to make pastime withal,'
twenty pounds 'for to disport her with this Christmas.' With the birth of
Elizabeth these poor tokens of kindness came to an end. Mary's own chamberlain
was sent to her with the order that she must no more call herself Princess,
which title might only rightly be borne by the Lady Elizabeth, and Giustiniani
wrote to the Signory that the King did not choose the Princess to be called so,
but only 'Madam Mary,' and that now there would be no rich marriage abroad for
her, but a nunnery more likely, as for her mother.

Mary was living alone near Chelmsford, not, except by letter, able to be
advised by her mother at Buckden. But in the matter of the King's message to
his daughter there is no doubt that the mother would have counselled the proud
answer Mary gave. She was accused of usurping arrogantly the title of Princess,
pretending to be heir apparent; 'she cannot in conscience think,' said this
communication, delivered by two earls and a dean, 'that she is the King's
lawful daughter, born in true matrimony'; she had deserved the King's high
displeasure for calling herself so, and punishment by the law. She answered--it
is a girl of seventeen writing:

'I desired to see the letter in which was written the lady Mary, the King's
daughter, leaving out the name of Princess. I marvelled at this, thinking your
Grace was not privy to it, not doubting but you take me for your lawful
daughter, born in true matrimony. If I agreed to the contrary, I should offend
God; in all things else you shall find me an obedient daughter.'

'From your manor of Beaulieu.'

Henry's answer was to take that manor away from her use and give it to
Anne's brother, while talk went on dropping from the courtiers to the common
people, that this new Queen meant the old one, now styled Princess Dowager,
some kind of mischief; there were hints of poison. Katherine did not, as the
Emperor's man saw, and she said, care a rush for herself, but she was
frightened for Mary, and wrote urgently and mysteriously, a letter terrifying
from its changes of mood; warning, making light, warning again. The beginning
hints at danger close at hand:

'Daughter, I heard such tidings to-day that I do perceive, if it is true,
the time is come that Almighty God will prove you.'

And she goes on to speak of a visit from a lady, who might bring a letter
from the King; the Queen insists on absolute obedience to his orders; 'obeying
the King your father in everything'; 'wheresoever and in whatsoever company you
shall come, obey the King's commandments.' But such obedience might very well
have implied the sin of acquiescing in injustice, and seeming to approve the
King's actions: and so the poor lady begs the child to speak few words, to go
no further with learning and disputation in the matter, and to meddle not at
all. She sends with the letter two books in Latin, the life of Christ and the
Epistles of Jerome, and suggests that Mary for distraction should play the
virginals, if she had any. There is a recommendation that she should keep
herself chaste, not desiring any husband, which may be an echo of the rumour
that she was to be married to some commoner; an outburst of affection comes
after, with an endeavour to seem cheerful, and a pretence of unconcern that
cannot have deceived Mary: 'I dare make sure that you shall see a very good
end, and better than you can desire.' Then a sentence bidding her, if she
should suddenly find herself in any place without friends, to keep her keys
herself. In the last few phrases of the letter warning sounds again, this time
without hope. 'And now you shall begin, and by likelihood I shall follow. I set
not a rush by it; for when they have done the uttermost they can, then I am
sure of the amendment. I pray you, recommend me unto my good Lady Salisbury,
and pray her to have a good heart, for we never come to the Kingdom of Heaven
but by trouble. Daughter, wheresoever you become, take no pain to send to me,
for if I may I will send to you.

'By your loving Mother,

'KATHERINE THE QUEEN.'

The two were knit together in their pride. From this time Mary set her whole
will to one end, the keeping of her rightful rank and title, with an obstinacy
which brought her, in certain tempers of the King, near enough to the block. If
it should seem ridiculous thus to quarrel, pray, weep, in a matter involving
change of livery, or the precedence of a baby's litter, it is to be remembered
that here the lesser thing stood for the greater. If Mary had precedence and
her title, then she was legitimate; if she were legitimate, then Katherine was
Henry's rightful wife and Queen. The solitary girl, resisting for two years all
promises and threats, shaken by her mother's death but maintaining the fight
for her mother's honour, is by no means a trivial or ridiculous figure, though
there were ridiculous incidents in this battle, as in most others. The King's
two daughters were to move from one palace to another; there were days of
dispute as to the method of transport, since if they went by road one litter
must necessarily walk ahead of the other, and Mary would not take second place.
She travelled by barge in the end, leaving the road to Elizabeth, after alarms
and excursions by courtiers to find a way out without resort to an order from
the King. It was absurd and sad.

Henry set himself to break this will. On the day of the Princess Elizabeth's
christening, which was undertaken with all imaginable ceremony, the herald who
proclaimed the baby Princess of England gave out Mary's degradation from that
estate. It was not announced in so many words that she was disinherited, but
the proclamation forbade her to wear the royal badge that she had used hitherto
on her liveries. Next, it was the King's wish that she should go to Hatfield,
there to be in waiting on her half-sister. This move the Emperor's envoy,
Chapuys, countered with something very like a threat to make trouble if any
such humiliation were put upon his master's cousin. The King gave up the plan,
but insisted that his daughter should at any rate go to Hatfield. The Duke of
Norfolk brought the order, which Mary did not dispute, only begging the Duke to
speak to her father, so that her servants' wages should be paid for the full
year. The Duke told her that she would need few servants where she was going,
and refused the offer of Lady Salisbury to come and serve the Princess at her
own expense. Mary went by litter to Hatfield.

There she was required to pay a visit of respect to the Princess Elizabeth;
she did not refuse to call the daughter of Lady Pembroke (Anne had been created
a Marchioness before her marriage) her sister, as she called brother the Duke
of Richmond that was her father's son; but her respects she would not pay. The
Duke of Suffolk, leaving the palace to report to Henry, asked if there were
anything she wished him to carry to the King. 'Nothing, but that the Princess,
his daughter, asks his blessing.' The Duke said bluntly that he would carry no
such message, and Mary as bluntly told him he might leave it.

A strange little scene comes next. Henry, riding down to see his younger
daughter, aware that Mary was in the house, had given orders that she was not
to attempt to speak with him, and sent Cromwell and his captain of the guard to
her room with instructions to keep her safe. She managed to send him a message,
however, asking if she might kiss his hand. He refused, and went out to his
horse again; but with his foot in the stirrup, looked up by some chance. Mary
was on the terrace, kneeling, with her hands clasped and held out to him. He
hesitated, bowed to her, put his hand to his hat, and departed. An explanation
was given to the French envoy a few days later; his daughter was obstinate by
reason of her Spanish blood, and until she yielded he would not speak to her.
The ambassador gently said that she had been very well brought up; 'on which
the tears came into his eyes, and he could not refrain from praising her.'

The contest of the prides went on. Anne came to Hatfield, and sent for Mary,
as Queen. The girl answered that she knew no Queen in England but her own
mother. Anne in rage swore that she would--almost the King's phrase--'break the
haughtiness of this Spanish blood,' and took such measures as she might. Mary
was not allowed henceforth to take her breakfast in her own room, as she had
always done; she must eat at the public table or not at all. She was without
money or proper clothing; she was forbidden to hear Mass; she was forbidden
private speech with her old tutor, Featherstone, but contrived it by talking to
him in Latin, which none of her other hearers understood; she was forbidden to
communicate by speech or letter with her mother or with Chapuys. When she was
ordered to Greenwich, just to have sight of him she made the steersman of her
barge keep the wrong side of the river, so as to pass by a little house in the
fields that Chapuys kept, he said, for a resort in time of plague. He stood on
the bank, and she on deck, and they looked at each other until the barge drew
out of his sight.

In 1535 Mary was ill. Her mother heard of it, and begged permission for them
to be together; she wrote in Spanish to her nephew's envoy, keeping clear of
all pitfalls of nomenclature, a letter that he might show to the King:

'I beg you will speak to his Highness, and desire him from me to do me the
charity to send his daughter and mine where I am; treating her with my own
hands, and by the advice of other physicians and of my own, if God pleases to
take her from this world my heart will rest satisfied; but otherwise, much
troubled. You shall also say to his Highness that there is no need of any other
person but myself to nurse her; that I will put her into my own bed where I
sleep, and watch her as may be needed.'

The King refused. The whole trouble between himself and his daughter came
from her mother's teaching, he told Chapuys; and perhaps remembered his own
letter to Chapuys' master concerning Katherine; how there was none in
Christendom more meet to frame the girl after the manner of Spain. The mischief
was done already. But he would not let the Lady Mary go to the Princess
Dowager.

All this Chapuys told his master in letters that grew increasingly insistent
on danger. Sir Thomas More's death seemed to him ominous for the Queen's safety
and her daughter's. The Queen was kept in an unhealthy place with few servants,
her meals cooked in her bedchamber, and--an ominous detail--the essai, or
testing of her food, no longer was made. She too was ill in the autumn; the
sickness had brought her to emaciation when Chapuys saw her; she could swallow
no food, and keep none down. It was, however, not regarded as a grave matter,
and when news of her sudden death came, two days after she had been supposed
out of danger, there was a general guess at poison--unjustly; for the doctors
who opened Katherine's body found 'some black round thing clung closely to the
outside of the heart'; a rupture. Mary, learning the event four days
afterwards, was left with the memory of much tenderness thwarted, and many
indignities suffered. By the Queen's will she received two legacies only; one
the fur, royal miniver and ermine, that had trimmed her dresses; the other, all
that was left to the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of old splendours in
her own country, 'my collar of gold, that I brought out of Spain.'

To the King this tussle with his daughter had become a matter of amour
propre; he set out to break her as he had broken horses in his youth. The
death of Anne made a little difference in the position. Katherine dead, Anne
dead, the new young Queen was lawfully her father's wife, and Mary made a timid
move, writing to Cromwell to speak for her to her father. 'I perceive that no
body durst speak for me so long as that woman lived which now is gone, whom I
pray our Lord of his great mercy to forgive.' (Anne too had sent a message in
her extremity, asking forgiveness from Mary.) She was permitted to write, and
did so. Her letter was not answered. She wrote again:

'For the which I humbly desire your Grace to pardon me, though I trouble you
with my continual suit and rude writing, for nature will suffer me to do none
otherwise; and that obtained, I shall have my chief worldly joy and desire, as
I take Almighty God to my record, whom I do and shall daily pray to preserve
your Grace and Queen with long life, and much honour, and shortly to send a
Prince between you both.'

The King did not answer; it appeared, Cromwell told her, that she had given
offence by putting her father second in her obedience to Almighty God. The
secretary drafted for her a humble appeal, in a style very different from her
own forthright manner; this she copied and sent. It was abject enough. Henry
supposed her beaten, and sent commissioners to Hunsdon to obtain her signature
to a statement admitting illegitimacy. She refused, temporised, and wrote to
Cromwell asking his help. In return came an alarming letter. She was wilful and
obstinate, diverse and contrary, lost in folly, presumptuous, unnatural and
ungrateful, unfit to live in a Christian congregation; this abuse, with a curt
refusal, since she would not be taught, to advise her, was all Mary's answer.
She had appealed to Cromwell as to a friend; except Chapuys she had no other,
and his indignation frightened her. She was cut off from Chapuys, who
nevertheless got a message through to her begging her to yield, insisting that
it was a question of her life. Some of the arguments used by the Councillors, a
duke, an earl, and the Bishop of Chester, have been preserved.

'They told her, since she was so unnatural as to oppose the King's will so
obstinately, they could scarce believe she was his bastard, and if she were
their daughter they would beat her and knock her head so hard against the wall
that they would make it as soft as baked apples; that she was a traitress and
should be punished and several other words.'

The King, knowing that she was isolated from all outside advice--her
governess and another had been ordered never to lose sight of her, day or
night--supposed her refusal to be due to the stubbornness of her servants, and
the Council was given leave to examine these. Certain known sympathisers were
arrested and questioned. Thus one of them, Sir Anthony Browne:

'Since Master Fitzwilliam's coming to court, he hath demanded of him whether
the Lady Mary be heir apparent or no, to whom he had answered, that in case she
would submit herself and be obedient as she ought to be, he trusted she should;
and if she will not be obedient to his Grace, I would, quoth he, that her head
was from her shoulders, that I might toss it here with my foot, and so put his
foot forward, spurning the rushes.'

Thus Chapuys:

'I wrote to her very fully, telling her among other things...that to save
her life, on which depended the peace of the realm, and the redress of the
great evils that prevail here, she must do everything, and dissemble for some
time; seeing that nothing was required expressly against God, or the articles
of the Faith.'

Thus Cromwell:

'I beseech God never to help me, if I know it not so certainly to be your
bounden duty, by God's laws and man's laws...to the witness whereof I take
Christ, whose mercy I refuse if I write anything unto you that I have not
professed in my heart and know to be true.'

Mary was beaten at last. She signed three articles; in the first she
submitted herself to her father; in the second she recognised him as the head
of the Church in England; the third, very brief, may be quoted in full:

'Item, I do frankly, and for the discharge of my duty towards God, the
King's highness, and his laws without other respect, recognise and acknowledge
that the marriage heretofore had between his majesty and my mother, the late
princess dowager, was by God's laws and man's law, incestuous and unlawful.

'MARYE.'

'Thenceforth a cock crew in my breast,' wrote one of the saints who had been
unfaithful; so must Mary have felt. She never forgot the signing of those two
last articles. She fought down two rebellions so that she might have power from
the throne to atone for her betrayal of the Church and her mother. The one
object was achieved eighteen years later, when by law of the Parliament of 1554
she resigned the title of supreme head of the Church of England; the other when
she made King a prince of her mother's house, and saw the sons of her father's
councillors on their knees to him.

II

ALASTOR. What cannot a well-dissembled religion do, when to this is
added youth, inexperiencedness, ambition, a natural animosity, and a mind
propense to anything that offers itself?...The cities murmur at the load of
calamities they must bear, and some there arc, I cannot tell who, that in
whispers say it is an unreasonable thing that the world should be turned upside
down for the private angers and ambitions of two or three persons.

Mary had to fight for her throne. English social conditions had thrown up in
her father's last years a whole new class of people, those who, having enriched
themselves by despoiling the old religion, were henceforth all for simplicity
in worship; willing to take their own chance at the needle's eye provided their
pastors and churches got through. By these means they made the best of both
worlds, and it is not surprising to find, grouped round the young King, a
number of lords of the new persuasion, very much concerned to keep the Pope out
of England, and their own possessions out of his clutches. The Princess, the
Crown's next heir, was the conduit, as one of them put it, by which the rats of
Rome might creep into their stronghold. She heard Mass daily, 'said both with
elevation over the head, the pax-giving, blessing, and crossing on the crown,
breathing, turning about, and all the other rites and accidents of the old time
appertaining.' She kept four chaplains of the old order despite her signed
protestation in the matter of the supremacy. They called her brother's
attention to the matter of the Lady Mary.

She was Edward's godmother, and he was fond of her, but he was zealous for
the new Church and his own dignity as head of it. He sent for Mary to
Westminster, and talked with her, in the presence of his advisers, for two
hours. The scene is noted in his journal:

'March 18th. The L. Mary, my sister, came to me to Westminster, where, after
salutations, she was called with my council into a chamber, where was declared
how long I had suffered her Mass against my will [these words in the
original are crossed out] in hope of her reconciliation, and how now being no
hope, which I perceived by her letters, unless I saw some short amendment, I
could not bear it. She answered, that her soul was God's, and her faith she
would not change, nor dissemble her opinion with contrary doings.'

It may be supposed from the wording--'it was declared'--that the King in
person had nothing to do with this decision, but sat mum while the Councillors
spoke in his name. The fact seems rather that the Council and bishops were put
to much trouble and humiliation by his insistence, for the Emperor at once
despatched an envoy threatening war if his cousin were compelled to act against
her conscience. Alarmed, they advised the King for a while 'to wink' at Mary's
proceedings, and sent off Dr. Wotton to the Emperor, who was brief with
him.

'Ought it not to suffice you that ye spill your own souls, but that ye have
a mind to force others to lose theirs? My cousin the princess is evil-handled
among you, her servants plucked from her, and she still cried upon to leave
Mass, to forsake her religion, in which her mother, her grandmother, and all of
our house have lived and died. I will not suffer it.'

Dr. Wotton reasoned with him.

'The Lady Mary, though she had a King to be father, hath a King to her
brother, and is kin to the Emperor, yet in England there is but one King, and
the King hath but one law to rule all his subjects by. The Lady Mary being no
King must content herself to be a subject.'

'A gentle law!' said the Emperor; and ended the interview with a repetition
of his threat.

The Council, having received Wotton's report, decided to take the chance of
the Emperor's anger, and proceeded with the enforcement of the Act of
Uniformity. Commissioners were sent to Mary to forbid the saying of Mass in her
house. She was gentle, but obstinate as ever.

'When the King's Majesty shall come to such years that he may be able to
judge these things himself, his Majesty shall find me ready to obey his orders
in religion; but now in these years, although he, good sweet King, have more
knowledge than any other of his years, yet it is not possible that he can be a
judge in these things. For if ships were to be sent to the seas, or any other
thing to be done touching the policy of the government of the realm, I am sure
you would not think his Highness yet able to consider what was to be done.' She
would not constrain her chaplains in any way, she said; but if they read the
new service in her house she would walk out of it.

The commissioners found the four chaplains more amenable than their
mistress. They promised to be obedient, and the commissioners were departing,
when the Princess spoke to them from her window. Her comptroller was kept in
London for refusing to carry to her this same message that the commissioners
had now delivered, and she asked for him to be sent back. She had been doing
his work, she said, learning how many loaves went to a bushel of wheat, and 'ye
wis my father and mother never brought me up to baking and brewing, and to be
plain with you, I am weary of mine office.'

The Council's answer was to intensify the lesser grievance, and leave the
greater one alone; her comptroller was put in the Tower, but her worship left
free. There were reasons for this behaviour. Her chief enemy among Edward's
advisers, Somerset the Protector, friend and correspondent of Calvin, was
accused of high treason; and the King's health was failing. Mary was next heir,
as the increasing number and dignity of her visitors witnessed when she came a
second time to Westminster to see her brother. He was pitifully ill, and
obstinate as his father before him. Henry could dissimulate, while remaining of
his own opinion still. Edward knew nothing of concealment, wept when the Bishop
advised him to wink at his sister's idolatry, and was, however the conviction
may have been arrived at, very fully convinced that the reformed religion was
necessary to the throne.

He ensured by Letters Patent that it should not lack; Jane Grey, his cousin,
daughter to the Duke of Suffolk and wife to the Duke of Northumberland's son,
was to succeed. The clauses of the will were roughly set out in his own hand
before he submitted it to the law officers of the Crown, with the Chief Justice
of the Common Pleas. These considered the document with despondency and alarm,
seeing perhaps a little further ahead than did the King and Council; they
raised objections at once. Such a bequest was contrary to the will of Henry
VIII; they, the judges, by meddling in such matters would incur the penalties
of high treason. The Duke of Northumberland insisted, and threatened; they
turned to the King, who ordered them to do as the Duke bade, and Parliament
should ratify what they did. The Council were afraid of the one, said the Chief
Justice, justifying himself to Mary later; and he himself 'was in as great fear
as ever he was in all his life before, seeing the King so earnest and
sharp.'

Edward died in July 1553, and the strange document, disinheriting Henry
VIII's two daughters in favour of his great-niece, was held to be legal and so
proclaimed, four days after the King's death. Mary had been sent for, to see
her brother; she was at Hunsdon in Hertfordshire, and could have reached
Greenwich in a day's ride. But she had some suspicion; the progress of the
King's illness had been kept secret, and this sudden summons had a threatening
look; she neither answered nor came. The Council waited two days while a
garrison with cannon was installed in the Tower, then sent for the Lord Mayor,
who came to Greenwich with six of his aldermen, and twelve other City
dignitaries, merchant adventurers and merchants of the staple. They were told
of the King's death and of his will, which they saw, and set their names to;
then were dismissed, with the order to keep the matter to themselves.
Officially, neither of the King's sisters knew of his death; but Sir Nicholas
Throckmorton got the news to Mary through her goldsmith, then going to Hunsdon
in the way of business. The story is set out by him in rhyme:

Mourning, from Greenwich did I straight depart,
To London, to an house that bore our name.
My brethren guessed by my heavy heart
The King was dead, and I confessed the same.
The hushing of his death I did unfold,--
Their meaning to proclaim Queen Jane I told.

And though I liked not the religion
Which all her life Queen Mary had professed,
Yet in my mind that wicked notion
Right heirs for to displace I did detest.

Mary distrusted the news, coming in so roundabout a fashion, but the
goldsmith assured her that Sir Nicholas knew it verily.' She had no doubts as
to the succession, that the throne was rightfully hers, but not knowing what
London was doing, or what support she might count on, she considered
expediency, and rode for the coast. At Kenninghall she halted to send out
proclamations as Queen, astonishing the Emperor's men, who would have advised
her to wait for her cousin's help, or else to quit England and return with a
borrowed army. (Lord Guildford Dudley was already soliciting 6000 men from
France.) But Mary was sure of herself. The throne was hers, righteously to be
fought for. She had waited long, and endured much to be Queen, and now she
drove at the Crown with astonishing vigour. In a week she had gathered together
30,000 men and could write to the usurper's Council a letter showing entire
confidence:

'We are not ignorant of your consultations to undo the provision made for
our preferment, nor of the great bands and provisions forcible wherewith ye be
assembled and prepared, by whom, and to what end, God and you know; and nature
can but fear some evil.'

They might still avoid bloodshed by yielding, which she summoned them to do,
and to cause her 'right and title to the crown and governance of the realm to
be proclaimed in our city of London, and other places, as to your wisdom shall
seem good, and as to this case appertaineth; not failing hereof, as our very
trust is in you.'

The Council answered insolently that Mary had been pronounced a bastard by
the everlasting laws of God, and most of the noble and learned universities of
Christendom, and therefore she should cease to vex and molest the true Queen
and her subjects, and be glad with her quietness to preserve the common state
of the realm. They signed themselves--Cranmer is among the signatories, and
William Cecil--'Your ladyship's friends, showing yourself an obedient subject.'
This despatched, Northumberland set out of London with what troops he could
gather, some six hundred men, to arrest the pretender; but before he set out
spoke to the lords, reminding them that so far as treason was concerned they
were all of a guiltiness. 'My lord,' said one, if ye mistrust any of us in this
matter, your grace is far deceived; for which of us can wipe his hands clean
thereof? Therefore herein your doubt is too far cast.' 'I pray God it be so,'
said the Duke, 'let us go in to dinner.'

Next day inquisitive and silent London crowds watched him ride through
Shoreditch. 'They press to see us,' said the Duke to his captain, 'but not one
saith, God speed us.' Within the Tower itself, counsel was divided; each
message that came from the counties split loyalties and dismayed opportunists;
not one of the prisoner-dictators trusted his associates; and when the ship
that had been sent to Yarmouth to prevent Mary's escape yielded cannon and men
to her, and this submission was known in the Tower, it caused, says the writer
of the Chronicle of Queen Jane, each man there to pluck in his horns. Three
days passed. Northumberland wrote sharply for men and supplies; his soldiers
were deserting, the country would not feed those that remained. But Queen Jane
was in no better case, and 'a slender answer he had again.'

The first waverers, Pembroke and Cheney, left the Tower, on some pretext of
consulting with the French ambassador, on the 13th of July. Lord Winchester had
meant to follow, but Queen Jane 'feared some packing in the Lord Treasurer,'
and had him brought to her at midnight from his house, together with the keys
of the Tower. She could send no help to her lieutenant Northumberland, now, at
the news of his betrayal by the shipmasters, retreating on Cambridge. She had
no power even in London, though her soldiers took up a young man who had
protested when her first proclamation was read and cut off his ears. She had no
contact with the foreign ambassadors. Her advisers were afraid of them, and
blustered.

'The Lord Cobham and Sir John Mason repaireth to the same ambassadors to
give them notice of the Lady Mary's proceeding against the state of this realm,
which is not to meddle in their causes of policy neither directly nor
indirectly, and so to charge them to use themselves as they give no occasion of
unkindness to be ministered unto them, whereas we would be most sorry for the
amity which on our part we mean to conserve and maintain.'

The ambassadors, despite the threat, understood by this time how the
business would go, and reported against intervention. Charles V, that cautious
cousin and ruler, sent a gentleman to talk with the English commissioners
unofficially at Brussels. This personage made excuses for not proffering his
condolences and congratulations before, but seemed well informed; in fact (the
foreign envoys had been quick with their news) he was able to give the
Englishmen details of the King's will, and tell them for certain that Queen
Jane was proclaimed. 'We said we had hitherto received the sorrowful news, but
the glad tidings were not as yet come to us by no letter.' Don Diego, walking
with them in the garden, had more to say, in confidence. 'Whether the two
daughters be bastard or no, or why it is done, we that be strangers have
nothing to do with the matter. You are bound to obey and serve his majesty
(Lord Guildford presumably) and therefore we take him for your King, and saith
he, for my part of all others I am glad that his majesty is set in this
office.'

This was better than any of the Council in England had expected. Two days
later the commissioners were sent for to speak with Charles in person, who was
properly regretful for the departed King, 'considering he was of such a great
towardness, and of such a hope to do good, and be a stay to Christendom.' But
as for recognising the new Queen, nothing was said of that, and the Emperor was
so vague in his manner and speech that the puzzled gentlemen could only record
that he seemed not unfriendly. 'Yet,' they wrote, 'to decypher him better
herein, it were not amiss in our opinions, when your lordships shall advertise
him either with some new league, or to tempt him what he will say to the old,
or by some means which your wisdom can better devise.'

The Council, understanding from this that until they could show a Queen
de facto they would get nothing categorical out of Charles, took such
measures as in the absence or the ill-success of their soldiers were all that
remained, and set the preachers to work at Paul's Cross. Many listened; but
there was no overwhelming demonstration of sympathy for the new order. The
people, in spite of King Edward's Letters Patent and the good fame of Queen
Jane herself, were not clear as to her claim, which was as confusing to them as
any theological mystery. That Mary should come after her brother they could
understand, if he left no direct heir; but how Jane, the old King's
great-niece, came into the succession at all they could not make out. She was
granddaughter of Henry VIII's younger sister; what of the elder sister, married
into Scotland, and her children? What of Queen Jane's own mother, nearer one
step to the throne than herself? If that mother should have a son, as she very
well might, being only in her thirties, what of Queen Jane then? The two
Princesses in the direct line were disinherited, both for reasons of divorce;
but what of Queen Jane's own grandfather, who had divorced his lawful wife to
marry the widowed Queen of France? And of her father, who had divorced Lord
Arundel's sister, without cause, to marry the Lady Frances, Queen Jane's
mother? The daughters of Henry VIII, each with one divorce in her history,
dispossessed in favour of the daughter of two generations of divorced parents,
and this with her mother, the actual heir, still alive--it was too much for the
preachers; they let the whole question alone in their sermons, hammering away
at the dangers of Popery.

In this they showed more wisdom than did the Council which sent them out to
preach. The feeling of the people for years had been bewildered in the matter
of legitimacy; they were, wrote Chapuys some years earlier, 'so much accustomed
to see and tolerate such disorderly things that they tacitly commit the redress
of the same to God.' But there was, in London at any rate, no bewilderment
concerning the Pope. He was a foreigner, and the English nation, that brew and
blend of a dozen raiding nationalities, was beginning to dislike foreigners on
general grounds. Hitherto there had been some specific grievances; for example,
they detested the French as subjects who had beaten their English masters in
fair fight, and the Dutch as skilful poachers of fishing. But for twenty years,
since Wolsey pulled England into the Continent's politics, the feeling against
strangers as such had been growing, until in the troubles to come Wyat could
set out his chief ground for discontent in the words: 'Lo, a great number of
Strangers be now arrived in Dover.' The Pope, therefore, with his Masses
(idolatrous), confessions (State secrets coming to Rome's ear), inquisitions
(the rack to restore Church property), and Peter's pence (spent to arm
England's enemies), was a very sure card for the preachers to play. The Emperor
might have been held up as the second bogey that Mary with her Spanish blood
and her determined Popishness would bring into the affairs of the realm; a
friendly power and cousin who might not keep his distance, whose Flemish
soldiers might be whistled into England to support present claims or deal with
future risings.

Either of these personages would have served the purpose of Queen Jane's
councillors very well had expediency been their sole consideration; but they
were concerned, being Englishmen, first to justify themselves, to prove that
their course of action had been undertaken in the best interests of the country
and with approval from on high. They insisted upon Queen Jane's right to the
Crown, leaving the possibility of invasion by foreign potentates to take second
place. Letters went out from the Tower requiring levies to be made, not for the
purpose of keeping religion safe, but 'for the repression and subduing of
certain tumults and rebellions moved there against us and our crown by certain
seditious men.' The preamble runs:

'Trusty and well-beloved, we greet you well, because we doubt not but this
our most lawful possession of the crown, with the free consent of the nobility
of our realm and other estates of the same is both plainly known and accepted
of you, as our most loving subjects, therefore we do not reiterate the
same.'

Every document of the brief reign does reiterate it; and while the
distracted gentlemen in the Tower thus argued and pleaded, Mary, by the mere
fact of being daughter to the old King, was gathering the eastern counties
round her. Queen Jane since she came to the Tower on the 10th of July had not
quitted it nor showed herself. She had signed what papers she was told, played
with some few of the Crown jewels kept in the Tower--pendants enamelled with
such subjects as John the Baptist's head, gold and damascene buttons, and a
'fish of gold, being a tooth pick'; and she had twice given orders that were
not disregarded, one which kept her father with her, and one which refused to
style her dearly-loved husband King.

At this time were with her in the Tower Archbishop Cranmer and the Bishop of
Ely; her father, Suffolk; the Earls of Arundel, Shrewsbury, and Pembroke, two
barons, and six knights; with that Marquis of Winchester, the Lord Treasurer on
whose account she had been obliged one night to send for the keys. Bad news had
already dwindled this poor number of supporters; Cecil had gone; those that
remained could not trust each other, and could not rest. With every runner into
London came the troubling certainty of Mary's triumph, and the letters sent out
by the Council reflected their despair. To Lord Rich in Essex, writing of
failure and desertions, and imploring help, they could only answer:

'Though the matter be grievous to us for divers respects, yet we must needs
give your lordship our hearty thanks for your ready advertisement thereof.
Requiring your lordship nevertheless like a nobleman to remain in that promise
and steadfastness to our sovereign lady Queen Jane's service...which neither
with honour, with safety, nor with duty, may we now forsake.'

This was on the 18th of July. Next day--Cecil, the far-seeing, had been
first to slip away--Pembroke and Arundel went out of the Tower to Baynard's
Castle, and sent for the Lord Mayor. He came, with the Recorder of the City and
many of the aldermen. Arundel spoke to them cautiously; their troubles were due
to the ambition of the Duke of Northumberland, who had thought to set up his
family and enrich himself; who had prevailed on King Edward, a minor and sick,
to lend himself to the lawless project. It was a long speech. Pembroke cut into
it with a gesture, pulling his sword from the sheath:

'And if the arguments of my lord Arundel do not persuade you, this sword
shall make Mary queen!'

They shouted; there was no need to canvass opinion. The Recorder sat down to
draw up a proclamation in form, and the Duke of Suffolk was sent for from the
Tower. The game was not even played out to its last counter. He came with a
train of unarmed men, and before he had speech with the rest of the Council,
himself proclaimed Queen Mary on Tower Hill.

Queen Jane's late lords, with her father and the Mayor at their backs, rode
through London to Paul's Cross, where ten days before Bishop Ridley had
declared Mary a bastard, and there proclaimed her Queen. A news-letter man then
in London sent out to his clients a description of the scene, which he had the
luck to see first-hand; how there were caps unnumbered going up, Lord Pembroke
filling his with money and tossing it to the crowd, money thrown out of
windows, bonfires: 'what with shouting and crying of the people, and ringing of
bells, there could no one hear almost what another said.'

Sir Nicholas Throckmorton's wife had been that day attending a christening
as proxy for Queen Jane. She came back late to the Tower with news of the baby,
Edward Underhill's son, called after Lord Guildford. In the chamber where the
Queen had been used to sit, she saw, astounded, that the cloth of estate, with
the great embroidered arms of England, was down; the Queen's possessions all
were gone. The Duke of Suffolk had ordered it, she was told. As for the Queen,
she was separated from her husband and lodged in another part of the Tower, in
the house of one of the warders, Master Partridge, two women servants only
being left in attendance.

The Council had forgotten her. They were from this moment only concerned to
prove their loyalty to the triumphant cause, and to convince Mary of their
entire faith, hope, and trust in her.

'Our bounden duties most humbly remembered to your most excellent majesty;
it may like the same to understand, that we, your most humble, faithful and
obedient subjects, having always (God we take to witness) remained your
highness true and humble subjects in our hearts, ever sithens the death of our
late sovereign lord and master, your highness brother, whom God pardon--' a
long letter, asking Mary graciously to accept their meaning, to pardon and
remit their former infirmities, was despatched at once by Lord Arundel, dated
'as from your majesties city of London.' Mary received it at its face value;
she had seen, in her life, much shifting of loyalty, and knew very well how to
assess that quicksilver quality. But she had soldiers with her, and an
overwhelming courage and purpose. She came straight to London on the strength
of this letter, making the move safely that would have meant death three weeks
before. On the 3rd of August, with her sister Elizabeth riding among her
ladies, Mary came into the City by Aldgate. 'The number of velvet coats that
did ride before her, as well strangers as others, was 740; and the number of
ladies and gentlemen that followed was 180. The queen's grace stayed in Aldgate
Street before the stage where the poor children stood, to hear an oration that
one of them made.'

She had always a liking for magnificence. On this day the short, fair, pale
woman wore a splendid dress of violet velvet, her white horse's trappings were
fringed with gold, six footmen walked by her, dressed wholly in cloth of gold;
her guard wore scarlet bound with black velvet, the Beefeaters' dress, with a
rose and a true-lover's knot embroidered on the breast in gold. She wept very
easily always, for joy as well as sorrow, and it is not matter for surprise
that the onlookers found her white-faced, her eyes heavy. At the Tower, in
which every English king began his reign, a great peal of ordnance was shot
off; Jane had been greeted with just such a peal when she came down the river
from Syon House; and there on the Green the State prisoners--but not Jane or
her husband--were brought out to kneel as the Queen entered: two bishops,
Courtenay, the old Duke of Norfolk, and the wife of her enemy, Somerset the
Protector. The Queen kissed and raised them, and with an exclamation tenderly
ironical--'These are my prisoners'--at last released her tears.

The usurpation was ended. Mary was secure, and her next actions were easy
enough to forecast. The papal nuncio in France wrote at this date to Rome:

'As soon as the Queen arrives in London it is supposed that she will have
the marriage between her mother and father declared valid, she is said much to
desire it, and wills it to be declared by all Parliaments and statutes, 'so
that her mother's and her own honour may be satisfied.' This determination of
Mary's was a commonplace of the chanceries. 'Another of her intentions is to
re-establish religion under the obedience of his Holiness.' She had made that
clear enough by her answers to her brother's insistence. She had done what she
could by patience and steadfastness, during the years that had passed since she
signed Cromwell's infamous articles, to atone for that yielding. She would have
died to atone; in her father's lifetime she had risked death more than once,
and during the Protectorship there had been moments when her fate seemed to
tilt towards the block. But always at the last moment pressure lessened, so
that the easy and swift way was closed again and she had to endure, withdrawn
in her country manor, a double impotence, as daughter of the Church and of
Katherine of Aragon. Her one opportunity, martyrdom, never came. Violent death
for a cause would have made a heroine of her, as of Jane Grey, but she was not
allowed it; and though her courage never sank, her judgment did, until it
became fixed, a sword thrust into a rock; while the judgment of her sister
Elizabeth, a shifting flame, preserved both her and her kingdom when the time
came. If Mary could have died for her two fixed ideas they might have
triumphed, but she had to live for them, and this she did clumsily,
dangerously, and to the defeat of her purpose.

In the chapel of the Tower she had a requiem Mass sung for her brother, the
boy who had wept when his Council obliged him to wink at idolatry. She sent out
preachers to Paul's Cross, who were heard at first riotously, even to the
throwing of knives, and afterwards left alone, so that the Lord Mayor was
ordered to make 'ancients of the companies resort to the sermons, lest the
preachers be discouraged.'

The Queen was conscious perhaps of having gone towards her goal too
abruptly, and the proclamation which followed these riots bade, with good
sense, the people leave 'these new found devilish terms of papist or heretic
and such like, and apply their whole care, study and travail to live in the
fear of God.' She was minded, she said, herself to observe the forms of the old
religion, which, as God and the world knew, she had from infancy practised, and
would be glad if her subjects would come, quietly and charitably, to the same
mind. But she would not compel them, 'unto such time as further order, by
common consent, should be taken.' The Londoners were not appeased, and the
younger sort went into the streets smelling out those churches where the Latin
Mass was being said, and making the kind of mocking trouble for which they were
notorious, until an order appeared bidding householders keep their children and
apprentices in order and awe. Children and apprentices could easily be dealt
with; so could open traitors to the Crown and Faith. The recusants in her own
household, however, gave Mary some trouble.

Elizabeth, her sister, and Anne of Cleves, only by contract her father's
wife, held out against her. Anne, too ugly and too obscure to have caught the
English imagination, was not a dangerous example; she had, besides, been
brought up in the Lutheran faith. But Elizabeth was always near her, a focus
for discontent now that Jane Grey was safe, and the next heir. The Queen sent
for her to tell her that she must conform, or else they might not remain
together.

Mary was most earnestly a Catholic, and determined for their souls' sake to
bring her sister and her people to the only faith that could save them; but she
was also a woman, and it may be supposed that she found this interview not
altogether without savour. She had been servant to Elizabeth once; the Duke of
Norfolk's men had put her by force into the litter that carried her to Hatfield
to that Humiliation; she had seen the badges torn from her liveries on the day
that Elizabeth was carried with trumpeters to Westminster. She gave her orders,
therefore, not without a kind of triumph, demanding obedience, but doubting it.
Her own submission had been made under threat of death, after many years of
persecution, with an accompanying consciousness of sin; she had damned herself
knowingly to save the people of England alive. The authority of her father, his
Council, and the Emperor had been required to make her yield, and she expected,
knowing something of her family's temper, the same conduct from Elizabeth.

She was deceived. Resistance was not prolonged more than a week. Elizabeth
was never, save occasionally for political or patriotic purposes, fiercely
Protestant, and even at twenty had a mind balanced too finely to be fanatical.
She asked that instruction in the Faith might be given, and eight days later
Mass was said in her household by a chaplain of the old order. This easy
conformity was suspect. The Queen sent again for Elizabeth, and asked very
seriously if her submission proceeded from conviction or from fear. From
conviction, Elizabeth answered, and would so declare in public; 'but as she
spoke she trembled.' Mary believed, and approved her sister's resolution with
gifts; a brooch of the history of the Old Testament, a brooch of the history of
Pyramus and Thisbe, a square tablet of gold, and--a strange present from
Katherine's daughter to Anne's--'a book of gold with the King's face, and her
grace's mother's.' There is an item in the list of Mary's jewels made a few
months before, another gift to a girl of the Reformed Faith, and of her own
blood: 'a lace for the neck of goldsmith's work, with small pearls 32,' noted
in her own hand as 'given to my cousin Jane Graye.'

That young Protestant was stubborn. A prisoner whose name is unknown, but
who was presumably a Protestant too, dined on Tuesday the 29th of August, in
Partridge the warder's house with the Lady Jane, 'she sitting at the board's
end,' as became one who was grand-daughter to a queen, and using her privilege
to bid the men put on their caps. She spoke of Mary gently, saying that she
knew her for a merciful princess, and had prayed God she might continue so.
After this, she asked who had preached at Paul's the Sunday before. She was
told; the name must have had a smack of the old Faith, for her next question
was: 'I pray you, have they mass in London?' 'Yes, forsooth,' her fellow
prisoner answered, 'in some places.' Lady Jane found it strange, but not so
strange as the sudden conversion of her father-in-law. (He had received the
sacrament publicly in the chapel of the Tower eight days before.) 'Who would
have thought,' said his son's wife, 'that he would have so done?' In hope of
pardon, the others thought. She was indignant.

'Though other men be of that opinion, I utterly am not; for what man is
there living, I pray you, although he had been innocent, that would hope of
life in that case; being in the field against the queen in person as general,
and after his taking so hated and evil spoke of, even by the commons? Who was
to judge that he should hope for pardon, whose life was odious to all men? But
what will ye more? like as his life was wicked and full of dissimulation, so
was his end thereafter. I pray God, I and no friend of mine die so.'

In this sort of talk the dinner passed away. When it ended, the prisoner
thanked her ladyship for accepting his company.

'She thanked me likewise, and said, I was welcome.' She thanked the warder
Partridge too, for bringing the unknown gentleman; his answer was humble to his
prisoner-guest. 'Madam, we were somewhat bold, not knowing that your ladyship
dined below until we found your ladyship there.'

A few weeks in the Tower had not quenched Lady Jane's pride; a few days had
been enough for her father-in-law. He wrote to Arundel, lately his companion in
Queen Jane's Council, now in Queen Mary's favour, whom he should have despised
as a time-server, begging his intercession:

'O, that it would please her good grace to give me life, yea, the life of a
dog, if I might but live and kiss her feet...O, that her mercy were such as she
would consider how little profit my dead and dismembered body can bring
her...Spare not, I pray, your bended knees for me in this distress. O, good my
lord, remember how sweet life is, and how bitter the contrary. Spare not your
speech and pains, for God, I hope, hath not shut out all hopes of comfort from
me in that gracious, princely, and womanlike heart.' The letter ends with a
prayer for patience to endure, and a heart to forgive the whole world, and is
signed:

'Once your fellow and loving companion, but now worthy of no name but
wretchedness and misery. J. D.'

He knew, and the letter itself in its abandonment shows, that he had no hope
of mercy; a man 'so hated and evil spoken of, even by the commons,' so long a
scorner of religion, and at last a traitor, he could put forward no grounds for
mercy except Queen Jane's warranty, stamped with the Great Seal of England. The
Council answered that the seal had been usurped, and bore no authority with it.
Northumberland then, some spark of nobility lighting in him, pleaded for his
children, and especially his son's wife, Jane, saying that she had not sought
the Crown, but 'by enticement and force' had been made to accept it. The
Council heard that in silence.

As he came back from his examination through the streets to the Tower,
guarded, a woman shook a bloody handkerchief at him. The blood was that of
Somerset, dead two years, whom he had brought to the block, as the people
supposed; the woman, like many others, had dipped her scrap of linen in the
Protector's blood, and treasured it as the relic of a good man unjustly
condemned. Now she shook it in the Duke's face for an omen, and cried out that
at last murder was to be revenged.

Next day he was brought to the scaffold, and 'putting off his gown of swan
coloured damask, leaned upon the east rail, making his own funeral oration to
the people.' The speech concerned itself solely with religion. At last he
perceived that the faith England had held thirty years before was the only true
one. The reformers were serpents, and their preachers, trumpets of sedition,
must be expelled if the country were to have peace. For himself he now
confessed himself a believer, a sinner, and recommended himself to their
prayers and the mercy of God.

Now would have seemed the time, if it were to be done at all, for the
execution of Jane Grey, soon after the collapse of her rebellion, while feeling
still ran high in the City. The Emperor's people urged this on Mary as the only
course. She would not consider it.

She had known the girl at court, had been her hostess at New Hall; and
though on that occasion Jane had made a pert and blasphemous comment on the
Eucharist, there had been something more than acquaintance between them, as the
gift of a necklace shows, and they were kin, not only in blood, but in
learning. Success with Elizabeth had given Mary some expectation of prevailing
even here, despite a certain religious doggedness in Ascham's pupil. She sent
divines to argue with the prisoner, whose unwilling treason saw itself half
condoned when the Queen set her father honourably free. (It appeared to the
Council that Suffolk was anything but a dangerous person, whose crime and whose
punishment lay in having, long ago, married a queen's daughter; a silly
harmless man.) Mary treated him friendly, gave Lady Jane a little more liberty,
though she still was kept from her husband; then became busy with plans for the
coronation.

Money was needed, and she went to the City in procession to ask for it,
halting at the various displays made by the companies and others in her honour.
There was one show topped with an angel clothed in green, who by a device, 'to
the marvelling of many ignorant persons,' seemed to lift his trumpet and blow.
There were children in women's dress, 'a very pretty pageant made very
gorgeously,' who gave the Queen, after certain orations and salutations, a
purse of a thousand pounds in gold. At Paul's the scholars sang; and a man with
a little flag in his hand mounted the steeple and stood on one leg on the very
weathercock, 'which was thought a matter impossible.' At the east end of the
church was a kind of altar, 'and there she stood long, for it was made of
rosemary, with all her arms and a crown in the midst.' Strange moment in a
pageant: the Queen halting to look long on the herb of remembrance surrounding
all her arms; France, England, Spain.

The Queen had her money with goodwill from the Londoners, who dearly loved a
show, and had for many years seen nothing but sober coats and gowns about the
streets. Next day she went on foot to Westminster to be crowned, in a dress of
blue velvet lined with ermine, with a circlet on her head, and endured five
hours of ceremony before she came out of church again, dressed now in red, with
a naked sword borne before her, holding her sceptre and in the other hand a
ball of gold, 'which she twirled and turned in her hand as she came homeward.'
She was Queen, so far as all the old ceremonies could make her so; supreme in
England over her subjects' lives and consciences. She was equipped with more
entire power than any woman had ever held in that country before. She was
loved, acknowledged, and owed responsibility only to God. She wasted no
time.

The first measure put before her first Parliament, after a Mass of the Holy
Ghost had been sung, was a Bill which in one condemnation repealed every one of
the Acts concerning religion that had been passed during the reign of her
father and brother; one clause dealt with the old matter of divorce, and it was
this that stuck in the throat of the Commons. Katherine's wrongs had been
forgotten by all except her daughter; the Pope, whose judgment had declared the
divorce unlawful, was by this time the bugbear of all true Englishmen. While
the Commons understood very well that Queen Mary's legitimacy was her sole
claim upon their loyalty, they would have preferred to take it for granted, and
respect the fait accompli of her succession without going into the
question of whether or no she had a right to succeed. The Pope's decree, lawful
in one matter, must logically be accepted in others; and there were many
members of both Houses who would have been the poorer for a re-confiscation of
Church property. There was trouble, especially in the Commons, and much
argument, with no prospect of the Bill passing. Mary's fixed idea had led her
almost at once into conflict.

The power was hers, and on her mother's side she had no understanding of
compromise, by which most English virtue Elizabeth was later to rule. But she
had advisers who knew its value. Parliament was prorogued for three days, and
when the Commons met again two new drafts were submitted to them. In the first
no mention whatever was made of the Pope; it required only the admission that
Henry VIII and his first wife had lived in lawful matrimony. Compromise scored
its usual success. There were no dissentients.

The second Bill begged the whole question of Church property, and dealt
chiefly with the Book of Common Prayer, called 'a new thing, imagined by a few
of singular opinions.' These few were strongly represented in the Commons, and
again there was argument. But since the Queen had been content to pass over the
matter of restoring stolen property, they agreed to meet her half-way, and
after two days' debate religion was re-established in the form it had known at
Henry's death; that is, the use of Latin was restored in the churches, with all
the sacraments, and all the splendours. On St. Katherine's Day, feast of the
Queen's mother's patron, 'the light in Paul's steeple went about the steeple
that night, and the singing men of Paul's choir with the children singing
anthems, as of old had been accustomed.'

Mary had done much in little time. She had without bloodshed quieted
rebellion, freed religion, and defended her name; but she was, from her long
retirement and a certain turn of mind not wholly English, unaware of how
greatly the temper of the people had changed since her father first began to
turn their faith upside down. In these first two months she succeeded in
putting back the clock; and for the rest of her reign was in that position
expressed by the French proverb, of one seeking midday at two in the
afternoon.

III

ALASTOR. Are dreams so heavy, then?
CHARON. They load my boat--load it, did I say?
They have sunk it before now.

As soon as Mary was perceived to be fairly settled in power the intrigues
began, conducted by the ambassadors of the Empire and of France. There were
minor aspirants, the Infant of Portugal, the King of Denmark, and one or two
less sounding European princes; but though they put in tentative claims which
the Council duly considered, the Emperor's word carried weight with his cousin,
and his nominee was his son. France had, at the moment, no marriageable royalty
to set up against the Prince of Spain, but the chance of gaining control of
English policy was not to be abandoned for that. The French ambassador, de
Noailles was a man of astuteness, and he had, in the English temper, an ally
more powerful than relationship by blood.

The insularity of this rich, mysterious, and troubled kingdom, its
self-sufficiency and hatred of foreigners, by whatever treaties bound, had been
noted. He could, following its more recent history, see very clearly that this
people cared little enough for the descent of their kings, and had no objection
to an admixture of commoner's blood, so long as it was English, with the royal.
The Tudors themselves had no very obvious right to sit where they did; their
claim was an affair on the distaff side, all seemingly tenuous to the
representative of a country where the Salic law prevailed. English speech and
an old name were enough for most Englishmen's loyalty. The ambassador, when he
understood this, began to look about him for some commoner who might be made to
serve as chestnut-snatcher, and fixed his attention on the Earl of Devon,
Edward Courtenay.

He was ten years younger than the Queen. His father had been beheaded in
Henry VIII's later years for persistence in the old Faith, and the boy,
arrested at the same time, had spent nearly half his life in the Tower.
Gardiner, the new Chancellor, himself a prisoner, had known him there, and
first brought his person and his misfortunes to Mary's notice. She was kind to
the handsome young man, pitying him. She restored the estates forfeited by
attainder; she made him an earl; there were rumours that she had given him her
father's great diamond, valued at sixteen thousand crowns. He was the only
Englishman who by his own birth--he had a little of the blood royal--the
Queen's evident liking, and his immense popularity with the common people, was
fitted for the office of consort. Reginald Pole was considered seriously by the
Council, who thought him, by reason of his age and nearer connection with the
throne, a more suitable match. But besides being in minor orders, he was
something of a Pope's man, that is to say, only once removed from the Emperor's
sphere of influence, and he had lived out of England too long; the people had
never heard of him. A foreign-bred priest had very little chance against the
Englishness of Courtenay, and de Noailles knew it, if the Council did not.

Mary was aware of the pressure which urged Courtenay upon her as a candidate
for the throne. She loved his mother; she had been generous to him. Had the
young man himself displayed ordinary prudence, dignity, and common sense she
might, to the great content of all England, have married him. But the Tower
proved to have been a bad school. He was riotous, extravagant, loose in all
ways. His mother and de Noailles worked vainly to give him some show of
self-discipline. The Queen watched, then declared in public that it was not to
her honour to marry a subject; in private, that she would not tie herself to a
man so unprincipled. The French parti seemed lost, and the Emperor's
ambassador, Renard, took the field.

He had spoken to her before her accession on this matter; now, with her way
and the Emperor's wishes clear, she listened to him, and seemed easily
persuaded. Renard had expected difficulties. He was aware, as she was not, of
the feeling in England against foreigners; and he could foresee something of
the trouble to come, which, though it might set England by the ears, would not
be to his master's disadvantage. He wrote, half contemptuously, half
affectionately, of her to the Cardinal de Granvelle:

'I know this queen; so good, so easy, without experience of life or of
statecraft; a novice in everything. I will tell you honestly my opinion, that
unless God guards her she will always be cheated and misled either by the
French or her own subjects; and at last taken off by poison or some other
means.'

Renard had the advantage of the Frenchman, not only in being the Emperor's
man, but in having a choice of husbands to offer. The Emperor's brother
Ferdinand and his nephew Maximilian were both available if Philip of Spain
failed. He pressed for Philip, of the three; and Mary, grateful to Charles V
for twenty years of sympathy and protection, was glad in this way to pay him
her debt. Still, she had grave doubts. Philip was young, he had a kingdom of
his own to look after; there would inevitably be trouble with the French if the
Low Countries, part of his appanage, were thus joined to England; and for her
own part, she told the ambassador, she had no wish to marry at all. She had
never known what it was to desire any man.

To the making of her final decision must have gone other considerations than
those of policy. Her Chancellor was wholly opposed to any such marriage; she
must by this time, being half a Tudor, have known that the commoners were
grumbling; the Councillors made it clear that they wanted an English consort,
Courtenay or another. Against these she set her old respect for the Emperor,
and the weight of her two fixed ideas: Spain, and the Church to which Spain was
faithful. A Catholic succession was necessary, and no other alliance would
certainly ensure it. Her people's souls were laid upon her; the Spanish
marriage meant the Catholic Mass. There is no need to suppose that she was
anything but honest when she told Renard that before the throne was hers she
had no thought of a husband. The decision was a hard one, made not without
tears, as the ambassador knew. She received him at night in a room wherein was
an altar, with the Blessed Sacrament exposed on it, and told him that since
this matter had been raised she had had no sleep, and come to no decision. But
she had asked help of God all that day, and would ask it again; 'kneeling on
both knees she recited the Veni Creator Spiritus, there being in the room only
myself and Mistress Clarence, who did the same.' The prayer ended, she rose,
and said to Renard quietly and briefly that she had considered his proposal;
she begged the Emperor would be a father to her; then, being assured that it
was the will of God, she gave her word before the altar to marry the Prince of
Spain, 'and to love him perfectly.'

Renard's message to the Emperor was triumphant. His victory had for the
moment to be kept secret, but there were spies about the court, even about the
Queen's person, and it was not long before de Noailles knew of the Queen's
decision. The Frenchman in haste informed his master, then set to work by the
wise use of rumour to terrify the English and rouse them. Stories of the
rapaciousness of the Spaniards went about the City of London. Where they came
from nobody asked; how much truth was in them nobody knew. The Tower and the
Cinque Ports were to be handed over to Philip's infantry, he was to suppress
Parliament, and instal the Inquisition in its place. De Noailles' activities
find laconic comment in the chronicles of the time: 'In the beginning of
November was the first notice among the people touching the marriage of the
Queen to the King of Spain.'

All this propaganda had its effect. 'Your Majesty knows,' Renard had written
to the Emperor, 'that the English are of a turbulent temper, and like their own
way in everything. They love change and novelty, either because of their
insular position, or because of their habitual contact with the sea, or because
their morals are corrupt.' They did like novelty, but not such novelties as
those that the French ambassador's rumours promised them soon; and they were
turbulent only when their dear insularity was threatened, as it seemed to be by
this too-powerful alliance with too close a neighbour. The Commons were all of
one mind, and told it plainly to Mary. She was as plain with their
deputation.

'For that you desire to see us married, we thank you. To dictate what
consort we shall choose, goes beyond your province. Sovereigns in these matters
suit their own tastes, considering also the good of their peoples.'

She dismissed them. Fear and uncertainty among the people took an ugly turn;
there were riots in the churches. Mary, her mind made up as to the marriage,
and perhaps with some notion of showing them the folly of combating a power now
established, chose this moment to hold the trial of Lady Jane.

There is a brief description of Lady Jane's dress, as she walked between
men-at-arms from the Tower to Guild Hall, her two gentlewomen following: 'A
black gown of cloth turned down; the cap lined with fese (face) velvet, and
edged about with the same, in a French hood, all black, with a black
habillement'--here this term has the sense of border--'a black velvet book
hanging before her, and another book in her hand open.' She pleaded guilty; so
did the Dudleys and Cranmer, arraigned with her. Sentence of death was passed,
as was inevitable, and the procession made its way back to the Tower. In spite
of the guard of four hundred halberdiers, it might have been thought that the
noisy London Protestants would acclaim, if they did not try to rescue her. She
was a shadowy figure to them, however, and no contemporary report has much to
say of the day's doings:

'Item, this year the 14th day of November the bishop of Canterbury Thomas
Cranmer and Lady Jane that would a been queen and three of the Dudleys
condemned at the Guildhall for high treason.'

'The 13 of November Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, Gilford Dudley
esquire, and Lady Jane his wife, Ambrose Dudley and Henry Dudley, esquires,
were arraigned at the Guild Hall of London of high treason against the Queen,
and were there condemned and had judgment to die.'

The account of Lady Jane's condemnation takes up no more space than this,
after which the Grey Friars Chronicle and Charles Wriothesley pass on then to
other things, such as the penitential riding of a priest, 'Sir Tho. Southwood,
alias parson Chekin' about the City in a cart 'for selling his wife, which he
said he had married.' Not that the chronicles were afraid to comment on the
marriage with Spain and the breaking up of Latin ceremonies; but when in August
Jane had been proclaimed, 'few or none said God save her,' the Londoners knew
nothing of her character or her person. 'Shall I tell you,' asks Erasmus in his
Colloquies, 'a sure way to be renowned without envy? Do some noble deed and die
young.' Lady Jane had not yet set down in full her claim to renown.

She wrote to Mary from the Tower about this time a letter which shows
something of her quality. It has directness, simplicity, and pride, Mary's own
attributes in writing, and does, besides, show most clearly where
responsibility for the late rebellion lay, which was not on the Lady Jane's
shoulders. She begins with an appeal for mercy. 'I can still on many grounds
conceive hope of your infinite clemency, it being known that the error imputed
to me has not been altogether caused by myself. Because although my fault may
be great, and I confess it to be so, nevertheless I am charged and esteemed
guilty more than I have deserved.' She had been staying with her own mother,
she said, when news came that the King could not live. The Duke of
Northumberland told her of it, and said that she must hold herself ready to go
to the Tower, on which account there was a dispute. 'The Duchess of
Northumberland was angry with me, and with the duchess my mother, saying that
if she had resolved to keep me in the house she should have kept her son, my
husband, near her, to whom she thought I would certainly have gone, and she
been free from the charge of me.' Lady Jane had two days' respite at Chelsea
before an order came from the Council; Lady Sidney brought it, 'who told me
with extraordinary seriousness that it was necessary for me to go with her,
which I did.' At Syon House she found five lords, 'who with unwonted caresses
and pleasantness, did me such reverence as was not at all suitable to my state,
kneeling down before me on the ground, and in many other ways making semblance
of honouring me,' which behaviour made me blush with infinite confusion.' The
King's will was told her; she heard it 'with infinite grief of mind.' 'How I
was beside myself, stupefied and troubled, I will leave it to those lords who
were present to testify, who saw me, overcome by sudden and unexpected grief,
fall on the ground, weeping very bitterly.' But they had their way with her,
and she went to the Tower, where without being asked the Lord Treasurer brought
her the crown, to try whether it became her well or no, and said that another
should be made for her husband; but this she would not have. 'I sent for the
earls of Arundel and Pembroke, and said to them, that if the crown belonged to
me I should be content to make my husband a duke, but would never consent to
make him King. Which resolution of mine gave his mother...great anger and
disdain, so that she being very angry with me, and greatly displeased,
persuaded her son not to sleep with me any longer as he was wont to do.' She
knew nothing, she said, of the Council's deliberations; but she was sure that
poison had been given her, both in Northumberland's house and the Tower, 'as I
have the best and most certain testimony, besides that since that time all my
hair has fallen off.' The letter ends without any further appeal for mercy.

Mary must have been touched by it. She had known herself what it was to
dread poison; she too had been puzzled and troubled by weathercock loyalties;
and she had endured the browbeating of a Council, with the spite of a woman set
by marriage in authority over her. The facts of the case she certainly knew,
and though it was necessary to let the girl come to trial, no preparations for
enforcing the penalty were made on Tower Hill. Lady Jane went back to an
imprisonment by no means rigorous, with liberty to walk where she chose in the
Queen's garden. She was, in fact, held as hostage for the good behaviour of her
family and friends. A little quiet, a year's docility on the part of these
would have been enough to set her free. Mary's marriage with Philip was, by the
end of December, settled; by the December following she might have a child.
There was no need to fear a second usurpation, at any rate not from that
quarter, and despite pressure from the Emperor's people, 'she could not be
induced to consent that Jane of Suffolk should die.' The focus of suspicion
shifted to Elizabeth.

She was at Hatfield, enjoying no more real liberty than the Lady Jane.
Various activities centred about her. She was the reformer's hope, the bulwark
against Spain, the next in succession, and moreover had astonishing personal
charm--'ung esprit plain d'incantation.' There was talk even among the Queen's
advisers of appeasing the people by marrying her to Courtenay, for whom she had
no small liking, despite his character, 'proud, poor, obstinate, inexperienced
and vindictive in the extreme.' Of this plan de Noailles wrote despairingly to
his master:

'It rests with the lord Courtenay to marry her, and go with her into his
west country, where they might raise powers, and make a bid together for the
crown. But by bad luck the fellow is a poltroon; he will attempt nothing. It
might be done, if he had the heart for it.'

Instead, he left Elizabeth alone at Hatfield while he remained at court,
dancing to whatever tune his apprehensions called. A nice irony sent him, the
English people's chosen consort, 'last sprig of the White Rose,' to greet on
behalf of the Queen Charles V's envoys, coming to make formal proposal for her
hand. There were no rejoicings in the streets as these came through London from
Tower wharf; their harbingers had been pelted with snowballs the day before by
those apprentices whom a previous decree appointed to be kept by their masters
in order and awe, 'so hateful was the sight of their coming in to them.' It was
bitter cold weather, and coals were scarce in London even at tenpence a sack.
Trade had been hampered by the troubles, food was scanty; yet the ambassadors
'had great presents given them of victuals by the Mayor,' and reported
themselves very well satisfied with their treatment, which was better than they
expected, 'at any rate from the nobility.' The citizens, however, saw these
lords as coming to bid for their Queen, intriguers who would take money out of
the country, and bring soldiers in. They were sullen. The Queen's ordinance
concerning the use of Latin in churches was neglected in most parishes from
fear of the people.

But when the terms of the marriage were announced in the presence chamber at
Westminster, they seemed not so very formidable to English liberties. The Queen
was to have 30,000 ducats a year for her jointure; her son, if she had one,
should inherit, as well as England, Burgundy and the Low Countries;
furthermore, a matter very surprising to the assembled lords, Gardiner told
them that 'we were much bounded to thank God that so noble, worthy and famous a
prince would vouchsafe so to humble himself, as in this marriage to take upon
him rather as a subject than otherwise; and that the queen should rule all
things as she doth now; and that there should be of the council no Spaniard,
neither should have the custody of any ports or castles; neither bear rule or
office in the queen's house, or elsewhere in all England.'

It was a generous arrangement. Gardiner had laboured hard for every clause
of it, putting his own prejudices aside; he had no liking for the match.
England was safeguarded, could lose neither dignity nor money by the treaty,
and stood to gain, if the Queen were fruitful, two other kingdoms. It was more
than the most obstinate Englishman had any right to expect, but still it was
distasteful. 'These news, although before they were not unknown to many, and
very much unliked, yet being now in this wise pronounced, were not only
credited, but also heavily taken of sundry men, yea, and thereat almost each
man was abashed, looking daily for worse matters to grow shortly after.'

'The Lord Mayor was sent for to court, with his sheriffs and forty of the
best commoners of the City, to hear in person, as was due to his authority, the
Queen's decision. He had done what he could to atone, by gifts and personal
deference to the envoys, for the snowballing and scowling faces in his streets,
but the Queen was not placated, and resentment showed through Gardiner's
speech, made in her name. 'The Lord Chancellor declared to them the Queen's
pleasure, which was that she intended to marry with the King of Spain, which
should be for the great preferment of the realm. And that they like obedient
subjects to accept her Grace's pleasure, and to be content and quiet
themselves. And further that God's religion, which she used and had set forth
new of late might be so observed and kept within the City that they might be a
spectacle to all the realm, which they had yet very slackly set forth, or else
if they will not be diligent to do and observe her laws and commandments they
should run in her high indignation and displeasure.'

The proclamation that followed was no more tactful:

'Her highness, considering the lightness and evil disposition of divers low
and seditious persons, who, seeking always novelties, and being seldom
contented with their present state, might peradventure at this time by their
naughty and disordered behaviour, attempt to stir discord,' ordered that all
strangers who might come with the Prince were to have 'courtesy, friendly and
gentle entertainment, without either by outward deeds, taunting words, or
unseemly countenance' jeopardising the goodwill that should exist between
peoples so newly and happily brought together.

But as a nation cannot be made virtuous by Act of Parliament, neither can it
be made tractable. The Spaniards were coming, the Spaniards were strangers;
Mary wrote to Renard a note in haste: 'Sir: I forgot to tell you one thing
to-night. The Chancellor, speaking of a match overseas, said that they might
make many promises, but would keep them or not as they chose, once the marriage
was signed and sealed.' 'Six days later, news came that Sir Peter Carew and
others were up in Devonshire, resisting of the King of Spain's coming.' This
was on January 20th; a week later London heard a more disquieting story, that
Sir Thomas Wyat had set up his standard in Maidstone.

Rebellion exploding in the south and west; this was known for certain,
besides rumours of Sir James Crofts having, gone to Wales, Mary's own
principality once, and faithful to her in trouble, to raise men there against
her. All these rebels had the marriage of the Queen in their mouths, and French
help in their hopes. The Princess Elizabeth was turning to de Noailles as, long
ago, her sister had turned to Chapuys for sympathy; French emissaries were seen
at her house; she had, provided site kept out of danger, and played her
favourite role of Mistress Facing-both-ways, a good chance of the throne. Had
success depended only on Elizabeth's self-control, it would have been sure;
unhappily there was Courtenay to be considered, privy to all the plans, afraid
for his life and his new dignities. He should have gone into the west to lead
his own people; instead he stood about the court like a ship's figurehead
planted in a garden, valiantly gesturing, but functionless. An interview with
the Chancellor alarmed him; there were hints of his forgotten duty to the
Queen, warnings to beware of the French. Courtenay had no fancy to risk another
fourteen years in the Tower, still less his head. He stumbled out some sort of
confession, which if it gave no names offered facts enough, and the outlines of
the plotters' campaign.

Wyat, Carew, and Crofts had linked themselves to wait the actual coming of
the Prince of Spain in the spring, when, with better weather--'it being now
cold and wet, and not the usual English season for commotion'--and the impetus
of an actual Spanish landing upon the imaginations of the people, together the
attempt would be made. Courtenay's folly broke this decision. The leaders,
finding their names and intentions known, struck at once, too soon, and
separately. Carew escaped to France, Crofts was taken in his bed before ever he
got to Wales. There remained Wyat, with his fifteen thousand Kentish men
gathered near Maidstone to offer quarrel to the Strangers.

His proclamation kept clear of religion and legitimacy, two subjects on
which English people had recently done enough thinking; it was a monument of
loyalty. He was bluff, he convinced. Men came up to him in the market-place of
Maidstone, 'which before had hated him, and he them,' to ask if it were true
that his quarrel was not against the Queen?

'"No," quod Wyat, "we mind nothing less than any wise to touch her Grace,
but to serve her and honour her, according to our duties."'

The enquirers were not only silenced, but moved to enthusiasm. One that was
rich, or reported so, came to him with an offer and an indiscretion:

'"Sir, they say I love my potage well. I will sell all my spoons, and all
the plate in my house, rather than your purpose shall quail, and sup my potage
with my mouth. I trust," quod he, "you will restore the right religion
again."'

'"Whist," quod Wyat, "you may not so much as name religion, for that will
withdraw from us the hearts of many. You must only make your quarrel for over
running by Strangers. And yet to thee be it said in counsel as to my friend, we
mind only the restitution of God's word. But no words!"'

He set the example. There was no mention in any of his speeches of the Mass.
His letter to the sheriff of Kent spoke vaguely of perils threatening the body
of the commonwealth; his proclamation to the commons of the shire insisted that
the Spaniards were already landed, and the foremost company arrived at
Rochester, marching to London 'in companies of ten, four, and six, with
harness, harquebusses and morions, and with matches I lighted.' His army
increased daily, weapons were found for them, some said by favour of the
Venetian envoy; and on the morning of January 26th London's gates began to be
guarded by volunteers in armour.

At Rochester, where Wyat arrived next day, there were no Spaniards
countermarching, and no trace of their occupation, but the Duke of Norfolk with
a herald was there, and six or some say five hundred white-coated Londoners
behind him. The herald, who after some dispute and rudeness got silence and a
hearing, read out that all rebels who would desist from their purpose should be
pardoned. Amid shouting, the pardon was refused; 'they had done nothing whereof
they should need any pardon.' Only one of the rebel leaders, Sir George Harper,
went over to the Duke, who received him kindly, as an old acquaintance.
Norfolk, 'an ancient and worthy captain, and yet by long imprisonment diswonted
from the knowledge of our malicious world and the iniquity of our time,' was
too trusting. The submission was feigned, and it is more than likely that Sir
George had brought with him money to spend in the Queen's camp; for next day,
while the Duke was directing his guns upon the town of Rochester, held strongly
by Wyat, the leader of the Whitecoats, one Brett, addressed his Londoners:

'Masters, we go about to fight against our native countrymen of England, and
our friends, in a quarrel unrightful and partly wicked, for they, considering
the great and manifold miseries which are like to fall upon us if we shall be
under the rule of the proud Spaniards or Strangers, are here assembled to make
resistance of the coming in of him or his favourers; and for that they know
right well that if we should be under their subjection they would, as slaves
and villains, spoil us of our goods and lands, ravish our wives before our
faces, and deflower our daughters in our presence, have taken upon them
now...this their enterprise, against which I think no English heart ought to
say, much less by fighting to withstand them.'

This, the quintessence and attar of all war speeches, produced its
invariable effect. The Whitecoats turned their firearms upon their own camp--'a
Jew would not have done the like, having received his hire to serve'; the Duke,
that guileless gentleman, retreated with such of his followers as remained, and
came back, well whipped and sans seven brass guns, to London. 'Ye should have
seen some of the guard come home, their coats turned, all ruined, without
arrows, or string in their bow, or sword, in very strange wise; which
discomforture, like as it was a heart-sore, and very displeasing to the queen
and council, even so was it almost as less joyous to the Londoners.' Sir George
Harper rejoined his leader to receive thanks and praises, and the unknown
supporter who had given his spoons was told that now he should eat his pottage
with silver. 'Who had seen the embracing, clipping, and congratulation used at
this meeting from traitor to traitor might justly wonder thereat. Shortly after
they had well clawed one another, they went together like themselves into
Rochester.'

London, at sight of its beaten and sorry company returned, took fright.
Lawyers pleaded at Westminster with armour under their robes, the Queen's Mass
was sung by an armoured priest, the Lord Mayor set about raising five hundred
foot-soldiers to be equipped at the cost of the City. Wyat was rumoured to be
near, coming up along Thames bank towards Blackheath and Greenwich. Guns were
laid at each one of the City gates, where a watch was kept day and night. This
was a threat very different from the blustering of Northumberland.

Mary saw her whole policy threatened. Victory for Wyat meant the end of
Catholicism in England, that she knew, and the end of the treasured alliance
with Spain. The little red-haired woman left her prayers, and ordered her
horse. At the Guildhall, to aldermen awkwardly carrying their unaccustomed
weapons, she made a speech under the great cloth of estate which rings like
tempered steel; she had a voice like a man, that could be heard at a great
distance:

'I am come to you in mine own person to tell you that which already you see
and know; that is, how traitorously and rebelliously a number of Kentishmen
have assembled themselves against us and you. Their pretence (as they said at
the first) was for a marriage determined for us, to the which, and to all the
articles thereof, ye have been made privy. But since, we have caused certain of
our privy council to go again unto them and to demand the cause of this their
rebellion; and it appeared then unto our said council, that the matter of the
marriage seemed to be but a Spanish cloak to cover their pretended purpose
against our religion; for that they arrogantly and traitorously demanded to
have the governance of our person, the keeping of the Tower, and the placing of
our councillors. Now, loving subjects, what I am ye right well know. I am your
queen, to whom at my coronation, when I was wedded to the realm and laws of the
same (the spousal ring whereof I have on my finger, which never hitherto was,
nor hereafter shall be left off) you promised your allegiance and obedience
unto me. And that I am the right and true inheritor of the crown of this realm
of England, I take all Christendom to witness...I say to you on the word of a
prince, I cannot tell how naturally the mother loveth the child, for I was
never the mother of any, but certainly if a prince and governor may as
naturally and earnestly love her subjects as the mother doth love the child,
then assure yourselves that I, being your lady and mistress, do as earnestly
and tenderly love and favour you...As concerning the marriage...I am not so
bent to my will, neither so precise nor affectionate that either for mine own
pleasure I could choose where I lust...For God I thank him, to whom be the
praise therefore, I have hitherto lived a virgin, and doubt nothing but with
God's grace I am able so to live still...And now, good subjects, pluck up your
hearts, and like true men stand fast against these rebels, both our enemies and
yours, and fear them not, for I assure you I fear them nothing at all.'

Mary spoke bluntly, as she wrote; her words had no Popish tang to them, in
spite of the reference to religion. It was the kind of talk to which the
subjects of the Tudors responded and were accustomed. (Elizabeth, who spoke in
parables with foreign ambassadors, but forthright and frank to her people, had
the trick of it too.) Perhaps the greatest tribute to the Queen's speech were
those cries heard among the shouts of loyalty to her person, of 'God save the
Prince of Spain.' It turned many hearts to her. For the moment she was all her
father's daughter.

The City took heart and stood to, not wasting time and lives on sorties, but
waiting for Wyat to come. London was his magnet; the Queen was there, and those
councillors he had promised to change. (The ambassadors, except Renard, were
already gone.) He had lost more than half of his fifteen thousand men by
desertion, but his purpose still held, and the smaller army was well led, and
lacked neither weapons nor food. His soldiers were provisioned at their own
charges for nine days; which, said he, should be long enough, 'finding half the
friends there as we think to have. Our hap shall be very hard if we be not at
London shortly after we stir; and being once in London, and having the Tower in
our hands, I trust you think we shall not lack money long after.'

Wyat reached Southwark on the 3rd of February, and set up two cannon against
London Bridge. All boats, by order of the Earl of Pembroke, had been withdrawn
to the Westminster side of the stream; the bridges were defended strongly; shot
from the White Tower and the Water-Gate harassed the Kentish men, and the
population of Southwark. 'Sir Nicholas Poynings, as it is said, being an
assistant at the Tower, was with the queen to know whether they should shoot
off at the Kentishmen, and so bet down the houses upon their heads. "Nay," said
the queen, "that were pity, for many poor men and householders are like to be
undone there and killed."' It was not guns but the swift river that saved
London from immediate attack, which held off for two days, the threat causing
utter confusion on the Queen's side of the stream. Then should ye have seen
taking in wares off the stalls in a most hasty manner; there was running up and
down in every place to weapons and harness; aged men were astonished, many
women wept for fear; children and maids ran into their houses, shutting the
doors for fear...so terrible and fearful at the first was Wyat and his armies'
coming to the most part of the citizens.'

Still the rebels could not get across. Wyat himself broke through the wall
of a house adjoining the gate at London Bridge foot, and got by way of the
leads into the lodge of the gate, 'where he found the porter in a slumber, and
his wife with others waking, watching a coal. "Whisht!" quod Wyat, "as you love
your lives, sit you still! You shall have no hurt!" Glad were they of that
warranty, pardy! What should they do? people better accustomed with the tankard
of beer to pass forth the night than acquainted with target and spear.' Wyat
got, with a few followers, on to the Bridge itself, but the drawbridge was up
in the middle, and guarded by the Lord Mayor in person, with cannon; no use to
attempt to contrive any passage there. He returned, 'saying to his mates, "This
place is too hot for us."'

But Wyat was a man of resource. The people of Southwark, whom he had treated
well--'the inhabitants said there was never men behaved themselves so honestly
as his company did there'--were afraid of cannon balls from the Tower; these
had not done much harm hitherto, but there was apprehension lest with practice
the gunners might aim better, 'to the utter desolation of this borough.' Wyat,
a wise captain, would not risk the enmity of friends for the sake of shaking a
threat over London which could never, owing to the strength of the defence in
that quarter, come to performance. He told them to be patient a little, that he
would soon ease them; and making out of this check a plan altogether different
and more formidable, turned his men, and marched up the river to Kingston. The
bridge there had been broken, but a barge was lying across the water, and some
of his men could swim. They fetched it across; and working from the barge, his
engineers 'trimmed the bridge with ladders, planks and beams, the same tied
together with ropes,' so quickly and with such skill that by ten at night the
army and guns were able to cross with safety. By nine next morning, Ash
Wednesday, he was mustering his force in Hyde Park.

The Londoners had been 'much joyous' the day of his departure. Now the
terror was on them again, and with reason. Their river and cannon no longer
defended them. Drums went through London at four in the morning, warning all
volunteers to arm and meet at Charing Cross. The Tower expected the Queen, but
she would not leave Whitehall; 'she sent word that she would tarry there to see
the uttermost. Many thought she would have been in the field in person.'

But she remained in her palace, praying, while ladies wailed round her,
wringing their hands: 'Alack, alack, some great mischief is toward. We shall
all be destroyed this night. What a sight is this, to see the queen's
bedchamber full of armed men! The like was never seen or heard before!' There
was throughout the palace such a running and crying of ladies and gentlewomen,
shutting of doors, and such a shrieking and noise as it was wonderful to
hear.'

Wyat's object was to capture her. As soon as his force was set in motion he
split it, Knyvett going down towards Westminster, while he kept more northerly,
along the wall of the Manor of St. James'. The Queen's main army was drawn up
at Charing Cross waiting for him. He abandoned the plan of coming at Whitehall
from two sides and turned a little out of his way to ride through the City,
hoping there perhaps to gather sympathisers or to create such a commotion that
companies of the Queen's army would be sent after him, thus breaking up that
force into defeatable units. The tail of his detachment was cut off by Lord
Pembroke's raiding horsemen; the rest, some five hundred men with their leader,
thrust on into the silent City.

There men in armour stood ranked on either side of Fleet Street as for a
procession; they neither attacked nor joined him, they were unwilling to commit
themselves; and Wyat's progress, as it was reported to the Lord Mayor by a
scout, had much the look of a triumph. 'They stood as men half out of their
lives, and many hollow hearts rejoiced in London.' Meanwhile the Queen's people
were closing the streets behind him, and there was fighting near
Westminster.

Wyat's generalship was of the kind that can deal with an enemy that fights,
but not with one that runs. He had promised his Kentish-men that they should
ride through London, and they rode, but with none of their objects gained; an
unbroken army at their backs, the citizens silent, and the Queen safe. He had
been, by the inaction of his enemies, drawn into a trap, and he knew it, though
the City did not. 'Whereupon grew great admiration amongst them that knew not
their doings in the field; how for policy, and to avoid much manslaughter, Wyat
was suffered purposely to pass along. Insomuch divers timorous and cold-hearted
soldiers came to the Queen, crying "All is lost! Away! Away! A barge! A
barge!"'

Mary was better informed; she asked only what Lord Pembroke was doing. He
was in the field, they told her; which meant, she knew, that he was cutting in
two by a charge of horse the little army that had gone into the City. '"Well,
then," quod her Grace, "fall to prayer! and I warrant you we shall hear better
news anon!"' Skirmishers outside sent a shower of arrows through the windows
into the room where she stood. There were cries of treason. Lord Pembroke's
attack had been wholly successful, but in the mêlée he had cut
down some men of the Queen's party, and their survivors came running hack
towards Whitehall, shouting that the Earl was gone over to Wyat. The Queen,
being told of it, answered that she would trust her Captain, Christ, and went
to her prayers again.

Wyat, riding towards Ludgate, knew nothing of all this. He was cut off from
Knyvett. The apathy of the citizens, the fighting at his back, and the silent
unfamiliar streets opening before him, were all so many omens of failure. His
own best qualities as a leader, courage and impetuousness, had lost him his
chance, and he knew as he came to Ludgate, shut and barred with cannon, that
now the only hope for life was to get out of London and across the Channel.
Since the first day of the rising he had worn a coat quilted with angels under
his armour, and had discussed with his friends how best to get away 'when
England should be no place to rest in.'

There was still a chance if he could get out of the cage, but Ludgate with
its ordnance was too formidable for a troop without artillery to break through.
Too late, he tried a ruse; 'some cried, Queen Mary hath granted our request,
and given us pardon. Others said, the Queen hath pardoned us.' Lord William
Howard, in command, called down to Wyat, knocking on the door with his sword,
'Avaunt, traitor! thou shalt not come in here.' 'I have kept touch,' answered
Wyat strangely, meaning perhaps that he had done all he could, and rode back,
with his sword drawn but reversed, holding it hilt upwards, towards the main
part of his force. At Whitehall some of Lord Pembroke's horsemen tackled him,
and there was brief sharp fighting, into whose midst came Norroy King of Arms
in his coat of office, sent by the Queen.

'Sir, it were best by my counsel to yield. You see this clay is gone against
you, and in resisting ye can get no good, but be the death of all these your
soldiers, to your great peril of soul. Perchance ye may find the queen
merciful, and the rather if ye stint so great a bloodshed as is like here to
be.'

Wyat had no great reverence for heralds; he had refused to let one speak at
Rochester, though he had 'the Arms of England on his back.' He answered now,
throwing clown his broken sword: 'Well, if I shall needs yield, I will yield me
to a gentleman.' Sir Maurice Berkeley told Wyat to mount behind him, and by
five in the afternoon, at dusk, he was brought by water to the Tower. There the
Lieutenant caught him by the collar and shook him, threatening him with his
dagger as one that had betrayed the Queen by making 'a most traitorous stir,
yielding her battle to her marvellous trouble and fright.' Wyat, though before
when the same accusation was made he had turned upon his accuser with an angry
denial--'I am no traitor, and it is not the part of an honest man to call me
so'--endured the insult without a word; 'but holding his arms under his side,
and looking grievously, with a grim look, upon the said Lieutenant, said, "It
is no mystery now."' He was richly dressed in a coat of mail with sleeves,
having a velvet cassock over it, laced with yellow, booted and spurred, and
with 'a fair hat of velvet' in which was pinned a paper with his name written
large. Whoever should take him had been offered by proclamation £100 in
money, and he, hearing of it, had gone in this way out to fight.

Forty persons altogether were killed in London, so far as could be learned
according to the Spanish ambassadors, only two of the Queen's men were killed,
and three wounded, 'which has the look of a miracle.' 'But there was many sore
hurt; and some think there was many slain in houses.'

Prisoners were taken, so many that the gaols were filled, and the overflow
had to be housed in churches.

Judgment was not long delayed. On the 10th of February, two days later, the
Lord Mayor tried and condemned forty-two rebellious persons; at Westminster,
thirty-two were tried. Wyat was not among them. There were many counts against
him, and it was found impossible to deal with so wide a matter in so short a
time. The Emperor wrote to Renard: 'In God's name, let her not deceive herself
with the delusion of clemency.' A terrible sermon was preached before the Queen
in her chapel by Gardiner on a text from the Second Epistle to the Corinthians,
where the Apostle speaks of forsaking unbelievers: 'And what concord hath
Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?'

'Fifthly and lastly, he asked a boon of the queen's highness...for the
purpose she would now be merciful to the body of the commonwealth and
conservation thereof, which could not be unless the rotten members were cut off
and consumed. And thus he ended soon after; whereby all the audience did gather
there should shortly follow sharp and cruel execution.'

Mary, with this sermon and the Emperor's exhortation in her ears, and the
example of what previous clemency had brought on her people in the way of fear
and tumult, went to deliberate with the Council, and confirm her. self in
resolution. When she freed Northumberland's supporters, Renard had written to
Ins master: 'Sire, the queen at any rate is excusable; she found matters in
such a condition when she came to the throne that she cannot possibly set
everything straight, or punish all who have been guilty one way or another;
otherwise she would be left without any vassals at all.' The Council, at that
time newly come together, and new to her character, had not proved itself
tractable: Mary had had to fight for her prerogative of mercy. She anticipated,
and found, no such difficulty in obtaining sanction to punish. It was good
policy as the times went; apart from that 'she foresaw great inconvenience, and
that it would be difficult to re-establish religion; but her conscience pricked
and goaded her so that she greatly wished she could find means to do it.' Now
the means suggested themselves, and she took them open-eyed, with what distress
of mind it is not easy to conjecture. She had fought and prayed and kept
herself on the throne so that England might, be brought back to God, mortgaged
to God, with herself and her issue for hostages. She was beginning at lengths
to understand that her brother's reign had lasted long enough to wound
Catholicism almost to death; she perceived that Wyat and his fifteen thousand
were not isolated zealots, but the more courageous representatives of a great
party of English opinion; and she prepared to be ruthless, as the Inquisition
in her mother's country was ruthless, employing every cruel argument upon the
body to save the priceless soul so as by fire.

Wyat's death was easily determined; he was a traitor to the Queen's two
dearest wishes, the marriage and the Mass. His lieutenants, sharers of his
opinion, rightly should suffer with him, and the treacherous captain of the
Whitecoats, Brett. The problem that she could not resolve was one nearer
home.

Lady Jane and her husband had been held in prison since August. They were
innocent and loyal, but all kinds of disloyalties clung about them. The Queen
believed that her young cousin Jane, a good child, though stubborn in religious
matters owing to her upbringing by reformers, would never make any further
attempt at the Crown. She had showed her trust by releasing Suffolk, Jane's
father, after three days' imprisonment, supposing him to be a good easy man
corrupted by the ambitions of one stronger than himself. He had accepted her
favours gratefully, and lived quietly withdrawn all the autumn in his house at
Sheen. There had been protestations of loyalty, which she, in whom the sense of
gratitude was so strong, accepted without question. When news came that trouble
was brewing in Kent, Mary sent a messenger to Suffolk requiring him to attend
her at court, who found him with his two brothers preparing to set out.
'"Marry," quoth he, "I was coming to her Grace: Ye may see, I am booted and
spurred, ready to ride, and I will but break my fast and go."' He gave the
messenger money and drink, then set off, but not for London. He rode into
Leicestershire with Lords Thomas and John, sounding Wyat's cry through the
Midlands: 'Lo, the strangers!' Lord Huntingdon went after them, and defeated
what soldiers they had got together; the Duke and his brothers fled, 'in
serving men's coats,' and were taken at Coventry. By the loth of February he,
with Lord John Grey, was in the Tower.

His daughter and her husband had been condemned in November; recording the
verdict at the Guildhall the Spanish ambassador wrote: 'But Jane will not die.'
The Queen still would not sign the death-warrant. She hesitated, signed,
withdrew, and sent her own confessor to reason with the prisoner. Dr. Feckenham
put Lady Jane through a catechism, with no success. She was stubborn on points
of doctrine; there were only two sacraments the bread of communion was not
Christ's flesh: the Bible was a Christian's only guide. To this last Feckenham
agreed, but would not allow that every man should interpret it to his own wish
and meaning; who but the Church had such authority? She answered shrewdly: 'The
faith of the Church must be tried by God's word, and not God's word by the
Church.' She spoke openly and frankly, with gentleness and courage. 'After this
Master Feckenham took his leave, saying, that he was sorry for her. "Troth it
is," quoth she, "that we shall never meet, unless God turn your heart; for I am
sure, unless you repent and turn to God, you are in evil case; and I pray to
God, in the bowels of his mercy, to send you his holy spirit. For he hath given
you his great gift of utterance, if it please him to open the eyes of your
heart to his truth."'

Feckenham's eloquence had spent itself; he went back to the Queen, to whom
the news of Suffolk's capture had that day been brought. Lady Jane knew nothing
of her father's treachery and failure; she wrote to him, thinking him free, and
herself on the eve of death, a letter in which reproach sounds without
bitterness:

FATHER, although it bath pleased God to hasten my death by you, by whom my
life should rather have been lengthened, vet I can so patiently take it, that I
yield God more hearty thanks for shortening my woeful clays, than if all the
world had been given into my possession, with life lengthened at my own
will...And yet, though I must needs acknowledge that being constrained, and as
you know well enough, continually essayed; yet in taking upon me, I seemed to
consent, and therein grievously offended the queen and her laws, yet do I
assuredly trust that this my offence to God is so much the less, in that being
in so royal estate as I was, my enforced honour never mingled with mine
innocent heart.'

Her father had the letter as they brought him into the Tower, two days
before she died.

Her scaffold was built up against the White Tower, and she walked to it, on
the 12th of February, in the black gown and hood she had worn at her
arraignment, with, as then, a book in her hands. She prayed as she walked, her
two women weeping behind her, 'her countenance nothing abashed, neither her
eyes anything moisted with tears.' On the scaffold she spoke to the people,
washing her hands of all guilt in the matter of rebellion, but confessing that
she had not served God as she ought, and asking their prayers while she still
lived. 'Then, kneeling down, she turned to Feckenham, saying, "Shall I say this
psalm?" And he said "Yea." Then she said the psalm of Miserere mei Deus
in English, in most devout manner to the end. Then she stood up, and gave her
maiden, mistress Tilney, her gloves and handkercher, and her book to Master
Bridges, the lieutenant's brother; forthwith she untied her gown. The hangman
went to help her therewith; then she desired him to let her alone, turning
towards her two gentlewomen, who helped her off therewith...giving her a fair
handkercher to knit about her eyes.

'Then the hangman kneeled down, and asked her forgiveness, whom she forgave
willingly. Then he willed her to stand upon the straw; which doing, she saw the
block. Then she said, "I pray you, dispatch me quickly." Then she kneeled down,
saying, "Will you take it off before I lay me down?" and the hangman answered
her, "No, madam." She tied the kercher about her eyes; then feeling for the
block, said, "What shall I do? Where is it?" One of the standers by guiding her
thereto, she laid her head down upon the block and stretched forth her body and
said: "Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit." And so she ended.'

Mary had reigned for six months: by now she understood something of her
people. She had refused at first to believe, her advisers when they insisted
that treachery unpunished spelt, to the English mind, not mercy but fear. The
Council insisted upon force, to which the ambassadors would have added, after
the Spanish fashion, bribery. 'Your Highness must know,' wrote Egmont to the
Prince of Spain, 'that the Emperor has not given me a sou for distribution
here; yet with the English, more than with any other people in the world, money
has power.' The Queen had no money, except that which had been raised in the
City as a personal gift to her; she was reduced to begging from her cousin, two
hundred thousand crowns, which she would return very shortly, and with what
interest might seem good to him. The Spanish envoys, to whom she wished to give
a gold ring apiece, refused on the grounds that the terms of their service
forbade it; but in their report they confessed that it was because they knew
she could not afford to make gifts. Disturbances up and down the whole country
had shaken confidence, and killed trade. There was want everywhere. The Queen
could not buy peace; she was compelled to impose it.

On Tuesday, the day after Lady Jane and her husband died, at every gate in
London a gallows was set up, besides two pair in Southwark, two pair in
Cheapside and Fleet Street, and three or four at Charing Cross; on Wednesday,
these served their purpose. On Saturday a proclamation banished all foreigners,
merchants, freemen, and ambassadors' servants only excepted. A week later the
Duke of Suffolk, 'a man...more easy indeed to be led than was thought
expedient, of stomach nevertheless stout and hardy,' died on Tower Hill. The
chiefs of Wyat's party were sent by barge to Kent for execution and example. On
Tower Green the scaffold was left standing, and Courtenay, back in the lodging
he had known as a boy, spent an uneasy fortnight without news. Three weeks
later, on Palm Sunday, Elizabeth herself was brought to the Tower by barge from
Westminster through the rain, and standing, 'the water over her shoe,' swore
ignorance of all plots past and to come. She had reason to cry out at the sight
of the soldiers: 'What, are all these harnessed men here for me?' The
chamberlain answered: 'No, madam,' but locked the doors on her very straitly.'
She was in danger, and knew it.

It was Wyat who defended her with the last words he spoke in his life.
'Whereas it is said and whistled abroad that I shall accuse my lady Elizabeth's
grace and the lord Courtenay; it is not so, good people, for I assure you
neither they nor any other now yonder in hold and durance was privy of my
rising or commotion before I began. And this is most true.'

The Emperor's men still were not appeased. Nothing was too small to take
their attention. Mary, remembering her duty to the Emperor--she signed herself
to him, 'your loving sister, cousin, daughter, and ally for ever'--tried to
content them. Boys playing Queen against Wyat in a meadow were whipped, and the
fellow that acted the Prince of Spain punished more strictly. A cat dressed in
vestments with a paper wafer in its paws, that was found hung up in Cheapside,
was taken down, and a reward of £6, 8s. 4d. immediately offered for the
apprehension of the blasphemer. A tailor, 'for shaving a dog in despite of
priesthood,' did public penance. In these small matters she was complaisant,
but no pressure would make Mary sign the warrant for her sister's death. Renard
wrote angrily to his master:

'Madam Elizabeth goes to-day to the Tower, pregnant they say, for she is a
light woman as her mother was. With her dead, and Courtenay, there would be
none left in this Kingdom to dispute the crown or trouble the Queen.' But since
the Queen would not give way in this matter, lie urged that the Prince should
come in person as soon as might be, and try what effect his personal influence
might have. He had noted the ready English acceptance of a fait
accompli, and insisted to the Queen that talk of the marriage was harmful,
without the fact; she, always blunt in policy as in speech, could not see why.
'I told her that in my opinion, subject to her correction, she had better for
the moment make no further mention of it. She would not conceal her intentions,
she said, but was determined, with God's help, to bring it to pass.' And she
added that if she might not have the Prince, then she would take no other
husband; rather would she give up her crown, and her state, and her life.'

She had divined in Philip, from Renard's talk of him, something of the
strong deliberate faith that filled her; the same determination, which no agony
of mind or physical risk would shake, to drag souls against their will out of
hell. She was near to the supreme power; she was established and feared, but
she had no money, and no single countryman of her own who would go with her all
the way back to Rome. She received the Prince's picture gladly, and waited for
him with a lifting spirit, but a quailing body. She had a physical disability
which made her not apt for marriage. Her mother's betrayal, her father's
ranging among women, the cynical bargaining which had made restless her own
youth, allowed no happy expectations. 'Truth is,' wrote Gomez de Silva to the
Emperor's secretary, 'this is no marriage of the flesh; she has undertaken it
fur the health of her Kingdom.'

Her kingdom, subdued, but stubbornly mistrustful, protested no more, and in
the beginning of June all the gallows in London were taken down.

IV

GABRIEL. Whither now?
PETRONIUS. To my closet.
GABRIEL. What to do there?
PETRONIUS. Why, I am asked for a marriage song, but
I think I will rather make an epitaph.

Philip delayed. He had hoped at first that his father would marry again, and
take the irksome duty off his shoulders. Charles was short with him, and he at
once submitted: 'As your majesty feels so strongly on this question, you know I
am so obedient a son that I can have no other will than yours.' But still he
delayed, and found various pretexts for putting off the English venture: the
money for the Queen's jointure was not yet minted, he had a mind to go into the
Low Countries first, he must travel strongly escorted--the French were reported
to be lying in wait for him in the Channel--and the ships were not ready.
Charles, well aware of the danger of delay, wrote to him sharply:

'SON: I send by this courier your marriage contract, which I have signed,
and which is now for you to approve...Since the Queen is so constant in
good-will to us, and so bent on the marriage, speaking of it in public and
private very obligingly, I have decided to send word to Count Egmont not to
quit that Kingdom until the treaty is concluded.'

To Mary he wrote at once, so as to leave the Prince no loophole, a letter of
congratulation.

'I could have wished that the gout would grant me a truce, so that I might
write to you with my own hand to thank you most affectionately for your
acceptance of the proposal made to you by my ambassadors on behalf of my
son.'

Instructions to the Prince urged tact in his new dominion; he was to be
sparing of words and lavish of money; he was to be civil to the unaccountable
English, and try to disarm them by paying them all proper attention. As for the
escort on which he insisted, no doubt, said the Emperor, that would be
necessary; but as soon as he was safe in England, the fleet must set sail.
There must be no cause given for jealousy or fear of Spain. 'Let no single one
of your infantry men set foot on shore, much less any captain or officer; all
trouble must be avoided.'

The Prince learned his lesson, and set sail with a minimum of display; three
thousand persons of his own household, six thousand sailors to man the ships,
and a thousand horses and mules. In the hold of his flagship was stowed bullion
to the amount of three million ducats, twenty cartloads of gold and silver, a
good prize for French marauders. But the Spanish fleet was too imposing, there
was no attack in the Channel, and on the 20th of July Philip came into
Southampton Water. Englishmen in his own liveries greeted him; a white hackney,
with a saddlecloth of crimson velvet embroidered with gold and jewels, was
waiting. He received the Garter from Lord Arundel, and wore 'the everyday badge
of this, with many stones, and a St. George in the middle, instead of his
Golden Fleece.'

Saturday he spent in Southampton, receiving courtesies, conferring honours,
and, with the Marquis de las Navas at his elbow for interpreter, speaking with
the English gentlemen who had come to do him honour. On Sunday he went to Mass
on foot. On. Monday, with a company of a thousand courtiers, guarded by three
hundred mounted archers of the Queen's own guard, he set out for Winchester
where she was waiting, looking, as one of his ministers noted, very well on
horseback, so that the English were astonished. There was one contretemps; he
did not take off his cap to a bishop; but having been told of this, he put it
right, and never afterwards offended. At Winchester the Bishop and clergy met
him, and after a Te Deum in the Cathedral accompanied him to his
lodging, the Dean's house. In the evening he with certain of his household went
by torchlight 'through gardens and an orchard,' to kiss the Queen's hand.

'She looked very well,' wrote a courtier, 'but somewhat older than we had
been told.' She always dressed very splendidly, and on this day, for all her
frailness, she was superb. 'Black velvet her dress was, with much gold
embroidery, silver, and pearls. On her head she wore a hood embroidered in
gold, and many fine rings on her hands. Her stomacher was of diamonds, and her
girdle too.' She went to the door to greet the Prince, and they kissed, as was
the English custom, before they went together to the dais. There they sat
talking for more than an hour, she in French, he in Spanish, the English
courtiers and her ladies watching; afterwards Mary beckoned them up,
introducing each by name; 'many gentlemen, and the ladies many, but these
latter ancient and ill-favoured mostly.' At last the Prince stood up to go, and
asked the Queen how he should bid her people goodnight. She told him, smiling,
the English words: 'Good-night, my lords all,' which he spoke very clearly as
he went through the chamber to his own lodging.

The English, lords and commoners alike, were disarmed by the looks and
affability of the stranger. He was fair-headed and bearded, like a Fleming;
well made, his face princely and gait straight and upright as he loseth no inch
of his height '; a good horseman, and by repute a famous jouster. With all
this, he drank beer for breakfast, and walked about freely, without ceremony,
so that the people might look at him. If he were seen too often at his prayers,
the time was not so far distant when an English king heard his three Masses a
day, and they bore him no grudge for it. His envoy's men had had a poor welcome
in London; the Prince himself found, even by English accounts, something like
enthusiasm at Winchester.

On Wednesday, July 25th, the day of Spain's patron, St. James, the Prince
with his nobles went at ten in the morning to the Cathedral. He was in white,
wearing besides a short gold cloak in the French fashion, the Queen's gift; a
gold sword, very rich; and a cap of black velvet with white plumes. The Queen
came half an hour later, following her heralds, and 'walking, as the custom
here is, between two bachelors, that when the marriage is over give place to
two married men.' Her dress was of white damask, embroidered with gold and
pearls, in the same pattern as the Prince's cloak; her headdress was black, her
stockings red, her shoes of black velvet. On her breast she wore a great
ruby.

The Prince was proclaimed by the regent Figueroa King of Naples, his
father's wedding gift. Their confessions were heard. The Lord Chamberlain
showed the contract of marriage, which had 'a great seal, and contained by
estimation twelve leaves.' The banns were called, no person objecting, and the
ceremony proceeded in English and Latin. The Queen was given away in the name
of her realm by Lords Derby, Bedford, and Pembroke, and for ring had a round
hoop of gold without any stone, which was her desire, for she said she would be
married as maidens were in the old time, and so she was.'

Mass followed the marriage. This over, the heralds proclaimed their
Majesties' titles: King and Queen of England, France, Naples, Jerusalem and
Ireland, Defenders of the Faith; Princes of Spain and Sicily; Archdukes of
Austria; Dukes of Milan, Burgundy and Brabant; Counts of Hapsburg, Flanders,
and the Tyrol. 'Which proclamation ended, the trumpets blew, and other noises
played.'

They dined together in the Bishop's palace, the Queen always keeping to the
right hand of the King. The feast was after the English rather than the Spanish
fashion, wasteful and gorgeous, with gold and silver plate, loud music, and all
the service performed by gentlemen. One of these, Edward Underhill, a
hot-gospeller whom Mary had taken back into her service, recorded in a diary
his own experience as a server on this very great clay:

'The second course at the marrying of a King is given to the hearers, I mean
the meat, but not the dishes, for they were of gold. It was my chance to carry
a great pasty of a red deer in a great charger, very delicately baked, which
for the weight thereof divers refused; the which pasty I sent unto London to my
wife and her brother, who cheered therewith many of their friends.'

By six the tremendous meal was over, and the company moved into a larger
room, where there was to be dancing. Here came a slight hitch in the
ceremonial, for the King and Queen should have led off together; but the King
knew no English and the Queen no Spanish dances, and so a compromise was
reached whereby they both danced an Allemand. Of this performance the malicious
Underhill records:

'I will not take upon myself to write of the dancings of the Spaniards, that
day; who were greatly out of countenance, specially King Philip's dancing, when
they did see my lord Bray, Mr. Carew and others so far exceed them, but will
leave it to the learned, as it behoved' him to be that shall write a story of
so great a triumph.'

Both English and Spaniards that were there agree that for splendour the
scene had never been matched; it was 'a wonder to see'; to describe it would be
'but a phantasie, and loss of paper and ink'; for magnificence and colour 'it
should seem to him that never see such, to be another world.'

At nine the King and Queen withdrew to their own apartments, bishops going
before them to bless the marriage bed with all ceremony; and by ten the palace
was quiet.

Next day came a clash of English and Spanish courtesies; the King's nobles,
accustomed to offer congratulations to their sovereigns in bed, were put off by
the Queen's scandalised ladies with the reproach that such a thing was 'not
honest.' No Englishwoman, they said, permitted herself to be seen by strangers
in such a case, the very morning after her marriage. This gave offence; the
Queen, learning of the refusal, sent two countesses of her own household to
fetch the Duchess of Alba to visit her. Now it was the turn of the Spaniards to
be scandalised. Mary, in her unceremonious fashion, rose as the Duchess entered
the room and walked to meet her; meeting, there was almost a struggle, the
Queen refusing her hands, which the Duchess had to kiss by force, and offering
her cheek instead, an unseemly honour. The matter of seating was long disputed,
the Duchess protesting that she would sit on the floor rather than share the
Queen's velvet bench. Two chairs of different height were sent for at last, of
which the Duchess, protesting still, took the lower; and such time as remained
after the claims of civility had been satisfied was employed in
conversation.

The stay at Winchester was short, ten days only. The Queen was impatient to
show her troublesome Londoners their handsome and friendly King. Whether the
Londoners were of her mind or not, they were glad of the chance to make a
display, and set about building street scenes of a grandeur excelling even
those that had been shown at her state entry the year before. On August 17th,
'being advertised that all triumphs and such pageants as were devised in London
against their coming thither were finished and ended,' they came from Richmond
by water and landed on the Southwark side of Thames. Of the rebel invasion no
trace remained; they passed through the Chancellor's house, where in February
Wyat's soldiers had waded knee deep in papers, burning his books, to London
Bridge, now hung with garlands. The guns at the Tower, which Mary had last
heard firing in earnest, let off a peal, and the Lord Mayor, who then had held
the bridge in armour, now came forward robed, carrying a silver mace for the
Queen to touch: the City's homage. Across the bridge itself leaned two giants,
holding up a shield with Latin verses, declaring that the citizens'

Mind, voice, study, power, and will,
Is only set to love thee, Philip, still.

The procession went forward from one pageant to another. The Nine Worthies
at Gracechurch Street were succeeded by a device made by foreign merchants,
where a king on horseback was shown 'all armed very gorgeously,' again
displaying verses in Latin. The Four Noble Philips at Cornhill 'liked the
King's highness and the queen wondrous well'; but best of all was the show at
the west end of Cheapside, displaying their genealogy and descent from Edward
III of England, which was contrived on the plan of a Jesse Tree; an old man
lying on his side, with an oak growing out of him, in whose branches did sit
fair young children,' representing all his descendants, with Philip and Mary
glorified in effigy on the topmost hough. At Paul's a scholar dressed in gold
gave the King a book; 'where also a fellow came slipping upon a cord, as an
arrow out of a bow, from Paul's steeple to the ground, and lighted with his
head forward on a great sort of feather beds.' There was an oration, more
poems, and again the running and rejoicing of a great number of people as were
there calling and crying "God save your graces," was an evident token of
testimony and witness of their faithful and unfeigned hearts to the queen's
highness and the King.'

They slept at Whitehall, where presents were waiting; a pair of regals from
the Queen of Poland, and from the Princess of Portugal gowns and headdresses
after the Spanish fashion. Concerning these, Gomez wrote to the Emperor's
secretary:

'The Queen is delighted, and diverts herself endlessly with them. She should
never put them off, to my mind; our dresses hide her thinness and age better
than the fashions of this country.' And of the King's behaviour in London: 'He
is well, the rheumatism which has troubled him a little of late seems to be
passing. He is good to the Queen, making allowance for her coldness; she lacks
wholly all sensibility of the flesh. He makes her happy, however, and being
together the other day it was observed that he spoke love-talk with her, which
she answered in the same manner.'

Perez, a secretary, wrote:

'The people of this Kingdom have shown themselves kinder to us than you or I
could have imagined; the King's treatment of them, his care and liberality,
would soften a stone. The majority is of our way of thinking, and it is my
opinion that between this new Parliament and the coming of the Legate, which is
most eagerly looked for, we may at last see the triumph of God's justice and
his holy faith.'

The Queen's plan was near to fruition. Her marriage was achieved, Englishmen
had a prince to obey at last, the rebels all were dead; and in the 'Tower, a
surer weapon than guns, was the great treasure Philip had brought out of Spain,
three hundred thousand ducats. The ambassadors, shrewd men, but apt to judge
after their own lights, had told her that her people were to be bought, and she
believed it; she had seen, in her father's time, men sell themselves for a
hundred acres. 'With this money under her hand she had no apprehensions
concerning her next move, the summoning of Pole, her cousin, the Pope's Legate.
London still grumbled, and mocked the priests occasionally, but London was not
the whole realm, it was not even irrevocably the capital of the realm. She held
over the merchants' heads the threat of shifting the Court and Parliament to
other cities while negotiations with the Pope went on.

He, aided by political experience of some hundreds of predecessors in
office, most of whom had come into conflict with the troublesome island in
their time, now understood that the English resistance was a matter not only of
pride, but of cupidity. If it were made a condition of his renewed supremacy
that the Church lands should be restored, his Holiness knew very well that Mary
stood to lose her throne. The Queen gone, there was nobody of opinion strong
enough to bring back the Catholic faith, and England would become, like
Germany, a battleground, with texts for banners. He made the necessary
concession. The Legate was empowered to make legal transfer of all lands and
goods forcibly taken twenty years before, the owners de facto becoming
the owners de jure. With this brief in his pocket there was no longer
any reason for delay. Pole sailed from Antwerp.

On the 18th of November he landed at Gravesend, and went direct to
Whitehall. The King went to the landing stage to meet him; the Queen waited in
the palace, under her cloth of estate, and received his blessing joyfully, as
from her cousin, and the Pope's envoy, and a man notable for his learning and
good life. On St. Andrew's Day the Legate, sitting at the right hand of the
Queen in the great chamber at Westminster, addressed the Lords and Commons:

'I have somewhat to say touching myself; and to give most humble and hearty
thanks to the King and Queen's majesties, and after them to you all, which of a
man exiled and banished from this commonwealth, have restored me to a member f
the same; and of a man having no place, neither here nor elsewhere within this
realm, have admitted me in place where to speak and be heard.'

He spoke of the ancient learning of Britain, the fervour of dead princes,
and of that unity which was the chief need of all Christian nations. 'Look upon
our nigh neighbours of Germany, who by swerving from this unity are miserably
afflicted with diversity of sects.' He spoke of intolerance, making no personal
application, but the hearers knew that his mother, Edward IV's granddaughter,
had died for her faith, and that he had been driven into exile. 'For those that
live under the Turk may live freely after their conscience, and so was it not
lawful here.' Then he came to the chief head of his mission; reconcilement,
through the labours and prayers of the State's two princes, with Rome, a
consummation which he gladly saw to be near at hand, 'and most glad of all that
the occasion thereof should come by me, being an Englishman born, which is, as
it were, to call home ourselves.' But neither he, nor the King, nor the Queen,
could compel it, and he urged the Parliament, like true Christians and
provident men, for the health of their souls and bodies to ponder what should
be clone in so weighty a cause.

Parliament pondered the Pope's fair offer no longer than a few hours. The
new House of Commons was a house of Catholics, and the Lords, secure in their
tenure of filched lands, saw nothing much to object to in taking off a cap to
the crucifix now and then. They considered these things, together with the
Queen's power, her money, and the backing of Spain, and returned to the
presence chamber where the King, Queen, and Legate waited. There and then,
'sitting all on their knees,' they presented a petition, declaring their sorrow
for past errors, and requiring the King and Queen, 'as persons undefiled in the
offence of this body,' to intercede for their pardon, 'that we may, as children
repentant, be received into the bosom and unity of Christ's Church. So as this
thy noble realm, with all the members thereof, may in unity and perfect
obedience to the See Apostolic, and Popes for the time being, serve God and
your majesties to the furtherance and advancement of his honour and glory.'

On the 28th of November High Mass was sung in Paul's before the Lord Mayor
and aldermen, wearing their scarlet gowns and cloaks, ten bishops, and a very
great crowd of people. At sermon time one of the prebendaries read out from the
pulpit a letter from the Council, ordering that Te Deum should be sting
in every London parish for the Queen. The choir followed up his words with a
burst of singing, the anthem Ne timeas, Maria--the angel's salutation.
Mary was with child, and had felt it stir in her womb at the moment of the
Cardinal's blessing. She was thirty-eight years old, Philip ten years
younger.

The Catholic succession was sure; son or daughter, her child was heir to
great territories by which English pride, still sore from the loss of France,
might find compensation. The headship of the Church, which had so heavily
weighed her conscience down, was put off at last, and with her people's
consent. She had feared herself to be incapable of bearing children, not only
by reason of her age, but of a disability which had gone with her all her life;
now her doctors and women assured her that she was quick. She had been afraid
of Philip's youth, and had heard talcs of his behaviour in the Low Countries;
he had been temperate and careful of English feeling, even to the point of
offending his own household by keeping English gentlemen always about him. He
was gentle with her, 'respectful as though he were not her spouse but her son.'
Charles' secretary wrote that the Emperor was glad of the King's popularity,
but most of all that he is seen and known to be attentive to the queen; also
that he goes about freely among the people, for which lie deserves much
praise.'

In April the Queen went to Hampton Court to wait for her child, and there
for the first time there was no free access to her, 'which seemed strange to
Englishmen,' accustomed to go in and out of the royal houses arid watch their
rulers at dinner or prayers. Mary felt a failing of her energy and determined
to conserve it. She gave audience no more, attended meetings of the Council and
received ambassadors rarely. Her whole strength was set to the slow making of
the child, as before she had concentrated it for the keeping of her throne, and
the clearing of her soul. She knew that God's mercy would not fail her; her
doctors were hopeful; Hampton Court was full of women come from all over the
country to welcome the child. Reason and faith assured her that the future was
safe. But as if some instinct deeper than reason were insisting on the truth,
she sent for her next heir, Elizabeth.

The Princess had been freed from the Tower at Philip's request. No evidence
had been brought against her; the only accusations came from malicious talk of
the Emperor's people. But the Queen was no longer sure of her loyalty, and she
went from the Tower into confinement at Woodstock as strict, though not as
ominous; she did not attend the marriage at Winchester; her servants were not
of her own choosing; letters were scrutinised. It was two years since she had
seen Mary, and when hue summons came to attend her at Hampton Court, 'bringing
rich dresses,' the Princess had some hope of future kindnesses and favour.

But her reception was unpromising. The Queen did not at once send for her,
and her apartments, next to the King's, were guarded as before. It was a
fortnight before the Chancellor with three others of the Council came to visit
her; by proxy of these gentlemen the sisters argued.

In this dispute the trend of the two minds shows clearly. Elizabeth, looking
forward constantly, refused to compromise herself; the Queen, a woman of plain
statements, vainly demanded yes or no. There was much going and coming of
lords, but nothing categorical could he had from Elizabeth, and at last once
more the keys were turned. A week passed.

One night at ten o'clock came a summons to the Queen's presence; guards
bearing torches, and the Mistress of the Robes in person, escorted the Princess
through the garden to Mary's lodging, and up the stairs to her bedroom.

'Well, you still persevere in your truth. Belike you will not confess but
that you have been wrongfully punished.'

'I must not say so, if it please your Majesty, to you.'

'Why, then, belike you will to others.'

'No, if it please your Majesty. I have borne the burden, and must bear it. I
humbly beseech your Majesty to have a good opinion of me, and to think me to be
your true subject, not only from the beginning hitherto, but for ever, as long
as life lasteth.'

The Queen made brief answer, 'very few comfortable words in English: but
what she said in Spanish, God knoweth'; perhaps she rebuked herself for her
lack of trust in God.

The ambassadors were writing home full reports of her daily increasing bulk,
the swelling of her breasts, all the signs of pregnancy advancing; a cradle had
been ordered, clothes were making, and toys were already arriving as gifts to
her child. Prayers were daily offered in the churches for her safe delivery.
Parliament begged Philip to take upon himself the government of the kingdom
during the minority of her Majesty's issue, 'if it should happen to the queen
otherwise than well.' All England was expectant. Happy in these expectations,
Mary, 'foreseeing the great dangers which by God's ordinance remain to all
women in their travail of children,' began to give consideration to her
will.

The existing document dates from the time of the second cruel deception
practised upon her by her sick body; it was made with 'the consent, agreement,
and good contentment of my most dear lord and husband,' and provided first for
almsgiving at her death; next: 'I will that the body of the virtuous lady and
my most clear and well-beloved mother of happy memory, Queen Katherine, which
lyeth now buried at Peterborough, shall within as short time as conveniently it
may after my burial be removed, brought, and laid nigh the place of my
sepulture.' There were to be prayers for her own soul, her mother's, and the
King's, 'when God should call him to his mercy out of this transitory life.'
Her father's and brother's debts were still unsettled. She wished that these,
and the money she had borrowed in her lifetime, should be paid. Such Church
lands as had come to her through her father were to be restored at the
discretion of the Legate, 'requiring my said cousin and most reverend father in
God, as he hath begun a good work in this realm, so he will do as much as he
may, by God's grace, to finish the same.' Legacies were left to 'my poor
servants that be ordinary, and have most need,' and to found hospitals for poor
soldiers. Lastly, the imperial Crown of England and Ireland, and her title to
France, 'to the heirs, issue, and fruit of my body, according to the laws of
this realm '; with these all jewels, ships, munitions of war, and artillery. To
Philip she left the love and duty of her subjects, 'as a legacy the which I
trust he shall enjoy,' and besides these the jewels that had been his marriage
gifts to her. Elizabeth was nowhere mentioned. The will ended with an
exhortation to her executors--Philip, Pole, and half a dozen lords of the
Council:

'And I charge my said Executors, as they will answer before God at the
dreadful day of Judgment, and as they will avoid such comminations,
threatenings, and the severe justice of God pronounced and executed against
such as are breakers and violators of wills, and testaments, that they to the
uttermost of their powers and wits, shall see this my present Testament and
last will performed and executed, for the which I trust God shall reward them,
and the world commend them.'

Her disorder, some manifestation of her old guest, amenorrhea, swelled her
and subsided. 'Queen Mary, by the running of water behind her skin, or as
others will, by a distemper which the physicians call mola, was declared to be
with child.' Her doctors declared it; she believed it for long, until proofs to
the contrary could not be denied. When the true state of her body was at last
understood, she added a codicil to her will. Since God had not thought it good
to send her issue, she left the Crown to her successor according to the
law--she would not name Elizabeth; and 'my most Dear Lord and Husband shall
have no government, order, and rule within this Realm.'

When this codicil came to be read, the flame of Catholicism, which she had
given her body and breath to keep alive, was sinking fast. Independence had
been an English characteristic long enough, and the Reformation, splitting
God's Word as a prism splits light, into a hundred colours of belief, because
it freed the spirit from authority was welcomed. The ceremonial of the Mass,
rich with fifteen centuries of tradition, could not find faith enough among
Englishmen to make of it anything more than mummery. Mary, seeing the altars
restored, holding the Golden Rose, the Pope's gift to sovereigns who defend the
aith, was deceived in her people's submission. She had brought them to a
religion they mistrusted, by a marriage which they detested; made a stranger
their king, and a foreign bishop their arbiter of conscience. They knelt, but
to the Crown and not the wafer.

'But now '--it is Cranmer speaking--'the omnipotent governor of all things
so turned the wheel of her own spinning against her, that her high buildings of
such joys and felicities came all to a Castle comedown, her hopes being
confounded, her purposes disappointed, and she now brought to desolation.' His
anger against her, which is representative of the people's feeling in the last
year of her life, came from two main causes. She saw her kingdom, except at
rare moments, with the eyes of Spain; and her policy, linking England with
Europe by marriage and faith, seemed to cheat the islanders of their
insularity.

Elizabeth, 'our peaceable Salome,' knowledgeable in the thoughts of the
common people, all English, without any tincture of foreign loyalty, made no
such mistake.

The will was disregarded. Queen Katherine still lay at Peterborough, the
alms were not given, the hospitals not founded, and the Masses not sung. Only
the unseen legacies, written between the lines of the document for those who
had eyes to see, were paid in full. Queen Mary died in October 1558 on her
great bed hung with the embroidered arms of England and Spain. Six weeks later,
an order went out for the reading of the daily service in English in all London
parishes. Six months more, and the supremacy of the Church was vested again in
the English Crown. Commissioners were sent out through the realm for the
establishing of true religion. Down came the altars.

Thirty years later the Invincible Armada set sail for the English coast.